The Mask Was a Strength. Say That Part First.
Before you can take the mask off, give it credit. For accomplished professionals in Austin who grew up around a narcissist, masking was the skill that got them out and up.
Honest writing on building a business, living with an invisible difference, and setting the mask down. Drawn from real experience and observation, written for you.
Before you can take the mask off, give it credit. For accomplished professionals in Austin who grew up around a narcissist, masking was the skill that got them out and up.
For a lot of accomplished professionals in Austin, masking didn't start at work. It started at home, managing a narcissistic parent or sibling, decades before anyone called it a skill.
Autistic women who mask well get diagnosed late or never, and the better we perform, the less help anyone thinks we need. Written from inside that pattern, for the women in Austin still carrying it alone.
Narcissistic abuse attacks your reality from inside the house. A world not built for autism attacks it from outside. For accomplished professionals in Austin who lived both, the effect was exponential, and masking was the only tool left.
'You look fine' is a heavy sentence for any accomplished woman managing an invisible difference. For Black women in Austin, there's an extra layer under it: strength gets mistaken for the absence of a problem.
Telling a friend, a coworker, or a doctor in Austin what's actually going on doesn't mean they hear it. Looking successful often makes people believe you less, not more.
I couldn't find a room in Austin for accomplished professionals who also live with chronic illness. So I'm building one downtown. Here's the whole idea.
Every founder pays a cost to build. When you're chronically ill in Austin, you pay a second, invisible tax on top. Naming it is the first way to stop overpaying.
Standing happy hours are a trap when your body is unpredictable. Here's how to meet serious founders in downtown Austin without wrecking yourself to do it.
A practical playbook for building a serious network in Austin when you never know which version of your body will show up. Tactics, scripts, and permission to opt out.
The discipline you learned running a function at a major company is exactly what building a business through chronic illness in Austin requires. Here's how it transfers.
You can't schedule a flare. You can build a business that survives one. Here's how experienced founders in Austin design their companies to bend on the bad days.
How to get real value from Austin's business scene (SXSW, meetups, conferences) without paying for it in a week of recovery. A chronically ill founder's triage system.
Grind-till-you-drop advice isn't just unhelpful when you're chronically ill, it's actively dangerous. Here's the sustainable model Austin's best operators use instead.
When you've been failed by providers, the last thing you need is another medical website. What chronically ill founders in Austin actually need is each other.
For a chronically ill founder in Austin, energy isn't a wellness topic, it's your scarcest capital. Here's how to allocate it like the strategic resource it is.
How to think about capital, runway, and investors when your own capacity is the variable nobody's modeling. Straight talk for Austin founders from a finance background.
Not all coworking is created equal when your body is unpredictable. What to look for in a downtown Austin workspace, and how to use one without overspending your energy.
Austin is full of high-achieving women building serious things while managing chronic illness, mostly invisibly. This is for them, and about why the invisibility has to end.
Boundaries aren't a wellness nicety when you're chronically ill, they're operational infrastructure. How to say no with the authority you already earned.
The structure of your business decides how much it costs you to be sick. How to design an Austin company around flexibility so a bad week bends it instead of breaking it.
The frameworks I learned in consulting turned out to be survival tools for building a business while chronically ill. Hypothesis-driven, 80/20, MECE, applied to a body.
For a chronically ill founder, delegation isn't a growth tactic, it's continuity insurance. How to let go of the work before a flare forces your hand.
You can be fiercely ambitious and refuse to sacrifice your health to prove it. A case for a different, quieter, more durable definition of success, built for Austin.
Most events are accidentally hostile to unpredictable bodies. A practical guide to hosting a downtown Austin gathering where chronically ill founders can actually thrive.
A founder's honest vision for a network of chronically ill, accomplished entrepreneurs in Austin, where it starts, where it's going, and how you can help build it.