On Stamps

What has been the biggest change to your beliefs or values in the past two years, and what caused this change?

Two years ago, I would have told you I had self-respect. I would have told you I didn’t care about approval. I would have said it convincingly, too. My actions told a very different story.

At the age of 19, MasterCard stamped my startup “VOID”: a command to cease and desist. I returned to college with empty hands and a bitter heart. At Penn, you were your stamps - earned and/or inherited. I took a job at a prestigious VC firm, survived a competitive summer, and collected one I’d been waiting for. The emptiness remained and my belief started to crack.

I’m not dismissing “stamps.” They’re useful. A good degree and a prestigious training ground help you cross borders; however, they don’t help you with the notoriously uncomfortable bed Joan Didion describes [in her essay, On Self-Respect]: “the one we make ourselves, the one we eventually lie down in alone.”

In my senior summer, I wanted to know who I was without an audience. Ten days of silent meditation. Three weeks of Muay Thai. Neither earned me a stamp, but both helped me make the bed. The VC job didn’t, so I spent my nights elsewhere - on robotics deep learning, a frontier with borders still being drawn.

I still collect stamps. But at night, I lie in a bed I made myself: lumpy, uncertain, mine. Stamps let you cross borders. Self-respect is what remains when you lie alone in a new bed as you chase your dreams on a foreign coast.