The personal blog of Ben Blain, his thoughts and flaws as a human.
My Startup Work:
It has been a quiet season but there is a reason.
Many years ago I first felt the slow heartbeat of healing. Like everyone, I loved and then my heart was broken. The crack in my heart filled with the waters of loss and froze into a cold blade within it. A glacier of grief piercing my centre but numbed to far distance.
For years the seasons rolled on, but inside me was this shard of permafrost that no warmth could reach. The warm hearts of beautiful, wonderful, people searched within me but could only ever find an incomplete heart to dance with. I wished for whole-heartedness while being unable to look to the pain within myself.
Healing does have a pulse. For me it felt like that first brief summer where enough warmth and safety surrounded me for the glacier in my heart to melt slightly, shrink slightly, and let the river of loss flow clean once more. Naturally though, the numb winters would return, and the glacier would refreeze… but occupy less of my heart than before. A slow pulse of healing.
I have since realised that it is too slow and needs to speed up.
I am lucky enough to have had chances in my life to build a future with a wonderful, kind, beautiful, wise, and loving person. Everything I could ever ask for in a romantic partner has been there for me. I could see her planting the seeds of our future in some hopeful garden filled with warmth and love, but I couldn’t go there. The ice in my heart prevented me because it is the antithesis of that loving garden.
The recent realisation that my heart is incapable of moving into a loving future is a profound one. It changes everything. It means that no matter who I find to be with, no matter how perfect we may be together, I cannot enter that loving garden as I am now.
I’ve since been examining the ice in my heart. It isn’t made out of anything romantic or noble or necessary. It is solidified hate, hurt, trauma, blame, fear, disbelief, and hunger for justice. It is a shard of slowly weeping poison that eats away at the future.
So, time for new mission parameters. First priority: be free of this deadly fucking ice! Second priority: step into that garden of love – forever after. What could be more important than this?
In other words, it’s high time I learned how to properly forgive.
18 May 2025, moving towards the fragrance of earth and flowers.
On Monday morning, at 5:50am, I went trotting off to the gym for a group workout. This was my first after a few weeks of ailments and my cardio sucked (predictably) but I did my best.
At the end, my coach said, “That was very hard for you, so I hope it makes you want to come here more.” I replied, “I’m just really proud of myself for turning up.” Nobody else did.
The reason I turned up that Monday morning was to put in the work for my own benefit. I did the same this morning and will do the same tomorrow too. Out of love for myself.
Working on yourself implies you aren’t enough as you are. That’s wrong. You are enough.
Do it for the love of yourself instead.
6 May 2025, Out of the gate and off for a walk…
Considering that all novelty fades, steel carves gold, and children are our future:
To wake up beside my love.
To breathe clean air, drink pure water, eat what I need.
Devote the day to real and simple things, living things.
To be unhurried and unwatched.
To admire others after their nature and know them by their names.
To have enough.
To be enough.
Living in a deeply meaningful world,
Cosy against the night,
Held in the darkness,
But unbeholden.
…………………………………………….
Waking up plugged in.
To breathe filtered air, drink metered water, eat fake food.
Grind my day through artificial manipulations,
Deadlines and kanban boards.
To envy others after their status and regard them by their value.
To have too much.
To be deficient.
Living through a chaotic whorl,
Scrolling through the night,
Bathing in the darkest patterns,
Of billionaire’s might.
…….
What are humans? Are we complex animals with simple needs? Or are we cogs to be worked for producing convenience and tyrannies?
27 April, Da Nang.
We’re going to talk about trauma.
I experience a ptsd response every so often and I don’t know why; it’s unclear what triggers it. Sometimes it’s progress. Sometimes it’s failure. Sometimes it’s nothing that I can identify.
The wave will come back and swamp me, plunge me back down to the bottom of the ocean. To the abyssal plateau.
Down there it feels dark and distant – entombed in the past. Usually the best thing to do is nothing. Just keep breathing. Practice acceptance, practice perspective, choose kind ways because the anxiety is terrible.
It’s hard not to snap at people, or sound pessimistic. So I wear the mask of myself for a little bit, knowing it will pass.
Then little by little… through dimples of sunlight in the morning… on bike rides… by making someone a cup of tea… I swim back to the surface. First to the mesopelagic, then to the epipelagic, and then (do you feel it?) breaking through once more! Back to this reality.
Surfacing is always followed by this nova of empathy, that rush of creativity, and a reaffirming of life. I don’t know why.
I don’t know why we have to dive, back down, at random intervals – but I’m beginning to accept that it is part of it (the healing).
Years ago I went to counselling for my trauma, and it was so intense I couldn’t do anything else. I now see that once a week was too much, I could never make it back to the surface in time.
For reasons unknown my body, my brain, know that I have to dive anyway. But I do get to surface with the sun on my face, and a heart full of treasure.
In this way you never stop understanding how it feels for people to be anxious. How it feels to be ill, desperate, or alone. Isolated and under immense pressure, shivering in the darkness. That is quite a gift, if you think about it.
Being Human is a deep thing.
To plumb the depths of human experience sometimes means to dive into the Kermadec trench.
19 March 2025, in the sunlight.