I keep coming back to the loom.

This morning the matcha was cooling on the desk and I was thinking about a thing I heard an entrepreneur say. If you’re going to make it, you need to become obsessed. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, the names he listed — they all had the same mindset, he said, and he broke it into three pieces: passion, vision, the scientific eye. A passionate visionary scientist.

I sat with it. It is a clean enough sentence. It is also not the sentence a woman my age, in my house, with my body, would have written. Obsessed is a young man’s word. It is what you say when you have not yet learned that the body is the instrument and the body has weather. Passionate visionary scientist is three nouns yoked together by force. It sounds like a uniform.

But underneath the noise of the words, the three pieces are real. I have lived them. So I want to translate them, because the translation matters, and the translation is the whole work some of us are here to do.

There are not three personalities one woman has to bolt onto herself. There are three women already sitting at her loom, and the work is to let all three of them weave on the same morning.

The three women

The first woman is the one who remembers. She is the one who knows the spool. She knows which fiber was spun by her own hands over the years, and which was given to her, and which was found on the road and added in. She is the past, present, and future of one thread; she sees that the основа — the foundation of the loom — was already being prepared the whole time she thought she was wandering. Without her, the cloth is anybody’s cloth.

The entrepreneur called this one passion. That is not quite right. It is closer to recognition — the moment a woman touches the spool and finds that her past, what she is doing now, and what she sees ahead are all one fiber. When that recognition lands, the body relaxes; the will does not have to be whipped. Passion, as he was describing it, is what you call this relaxation when you only see it from the outside.

The second woman is the one who sees. She stands a few steps back from the loom and looks at the cloth that is not yet there. She can see the finished thing — not exactly, not the colour of every line, but the shape of it, where it will hang, who will sit on it. Then she walks back to the frame and works backward from what she saw.

The entrepreneur called her the visionary. That is right, but he made it sound like a faculty you switch on, like a lamp. It is gentler than that, and stranger. The woman who sees is the one who has stopped doing the next obvious task long enough that an image arrives. Most days she does not arrive. Some mornings, walking, washing a cup, sitting still in front of the spool, she does. The work is to make room for her — not to summon her by force.

The third woman is the one who tries today. She picks up the shuttle and runs one quick line of weft across the warp. Then she looks at how it lies. If it lies wrong, she does not blame herself, she does not assign it meaning. She says: that is one way I have learned does not work, and she sends the shuttle back the other way.

The entrepreneur called her the scientist. Yes. She is the one who survives the long years, because she is the one who treats the day’s small attempt as data, not as identity. She is also the one who saves the other two — because the woman who remembers can drown in her own past, and the woman who sees can drift into pure vision, and only the woman who tries today brings either of them back to the cloth.

Three women. One loom. One spool of fiber. One morning.

Why I am rewriting his sentence

I am not arguing with him. I am translating, because translation is the second-half-of-life work that almost no one is doing.

A woman beginning later does not need to become obsessed. She does not need to whip her will into a thirty-year-old’s stamina. She cannot — and not because she is less, but because her body has already learned that ignoring it costs her the year. What she needs is to notice that she has been three women all along; that the obsession was a young man’s word for what is, in her, simply alignment; and that the question is not am I willing to suffer enough, but which of the three am I starving today.

That is the method. Sit at the loom each morning. Ask: which of the three is missing? Then let her in.

The lineage of this idea

I do not own these three women. Nobody does. They show up in every century, with different names, in different rooms.

The first woman — the one who remembers — has the longest line behind her. Joseph Campbell read the call-from-your-origins into the hero’s journey; he was reading something the old myths already knew. Viktor Frankl, writing from a camp, said meaning is not something you find but the thing you align with. Steve Jobs in his Stanford speech told a generation of young people: you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards, which is the same sentence the entrepreneur quoted to me this morning.

The women who have said it best, to my ear, said it the most plainly. Joan Didion: we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Maya Angelou: there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. Brené Brown, who has built an entire research life around it, calls it the practice of owning your story — and she is precise about the cost of refusing to. Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, said the past is the only material we ever have. The English writer Hilary Mantel said, late in her life, that what she finally understood was that she had been the same writer since she was a child; the work was to admit it.

Closer to my own desk: Molly Gordon — whose work I have been studying for months — built her whole Authentic Promotion practice on the premise that selling becomes terrifying the moment we lose the thread between who we were and what we are offering, and natural again the moment we recover it. That work is exactly the first-woman work, taught one woman at a time, over decades.

The second woman — the one who sees — sits in a different lineage. The neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, gave us the language that the right hemisphere of the brain — the older, quieter side — is the one that takes in the whole; the left hemisphere is the precise servant. The entrepreneur this morning called the older side the visionary; McGilchrist would call it the side that does not forget context. Daniel Kahneman called the same pair system 1 and system 2. Brian Eno, with his Oblique Strategies deck, designed an entire practical tool for tricking the seeing-woman into the room when the doing-woman has been working too long.

The women in this line are often quieter, because vision is not loud. Maria Popova, who has been writing The Marginalian for nearly twenty years, is the long example: a woman whose entire daily practice is to make room for the seeing. Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, argued that the hero-quest is one shape of story but not the only one — and that a different shape, the woman with a basket who gathers and carries, also makes a world. That is the seeing-woman’s manifesto, written before anyone called it a manifesto.

The third woman — the one who tries today — has the most recent vocabulary, because she is the engineer’s woman. Eric Ries called her work the lean startup: build the smallest thing, ship it, watch what happens, decide from data. Steve Blank built customer development on the same ground. Paul Graham’s whole essay archive from Y Combinator is one long letter to this woman: make something people want, then ship the next thing.

The women in this line are easier to point at than to find space for, because the engineer’s culture has often not made room for them. Frances Arnold won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for directed evolution — running thousands of cheap experiments and letting the data, not her opinion, decide. Reshma Saujani built Girls Who Code on the explicit observation that women are taught to wait until something is perfect to show it, and that the cure is to ship the imperfect thing today.

And then there are the women — the ones I think about most — who hold all three at once. Brené Brown, who is by trade a researcher (third woman), grounded in her own story (first woman), and is unmistakably someone who saw the cultural moment of vulnerability before anyone else did (second woman). Cheryl Strayed, whose Wild is at once memory, vision, and shipped experiment. Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic. Pema Chödrön, in a less commercial register, in When Things Fall Apart.

The lineage is not three separate teams. It is a long line of people who eventually realized that you cannot send one of the three women home and still weave cloth. The work — the only work — is to keep all three in the room.

My own three women, this morning

Let me show you, because the showing matters more than the saying.

The one who remembers — what is on my spool, today, May 2026, fifty-one years in: a Bulgarian village childhood. Two languages I love. A husband I am still in this with, twenty-three years on. Three children, two daughters and a son. Twenty-five years at a desk doing data engineering for companies that did not know my name. A piece of land near Bankya I bought, forgot, and found again last month with my daughters on my birthday. Three years of daily writing nobody read. Two weeks of daily writing that has begun to be read. The internet, which arrived in my twenties and which I have used as a private library for thirty years. A spiritual practice — walking, sitting, matcha, journaling — that I have kept with no audience. The thread is one thread. I can feel where it goes.

The one who sees — what I look at when I stand back from the loom: a body of essays, somewhere in the hundreds, that have taught women like me (older, called, not obviously fit for the visibility era) that they have more thread on their spool than anyone has been telling them. A small course, taught only to the readers, that gives them the loom — the Claude practice — without taking their thread. A book whose working title is Park Musings for the Renaissance Entrepreneur. A husband who is still affirming this in ten years. Daughters who saw what it looked like when their mother stopped postponing.

The one who tries today — the shuttle pass for this morning: write this essay, publish it on the blog by tonight, send the link to Substack tomorrow at seven. That is one pass. Tomorrow there will be another. The pass does not have to be glamorous. It has to actually go across the warp.

That is the alignment the entrepreneur was pointing at, in his language. In mine it is quieter, and it does not require obsession. It requires sitting down at the loom every morning, and not sending any of the three women out of the room.

The questions, one woman at a time

If you want to do this for yourself — which is what the essay is for — here are the questions. Take them slow. The body answers these, not the mind. A good answer is one that, walking in the park later, you can still feel sitting in your chest.

Questions for the woman who remembers (the origin)

Sit with the spool. Do not summarize yet. Just answer.

1. What were you doing, between the ages of seven and twelve, when nobody was watching and time disappeared? Be specific about the activity, the room, the smell of the room.
2. What is the work — paid or unpaid — that, looking back, you have been doing in some form for more than ten years? What is the underneath of it; what was the actual verb?
3. What is the wound — and there is always one — that turned out, decades later, to have given you a particular kind of sight other people did not get? Do not dress this one up.
4. What is the language — literal language, or a craft-language, or a body-language — that you arrived into and that you can now speak in a way no native speaker can, because you came in from outside?
5. What is the practice you kept, with no audience, for years? (This one almost always names the spool.)
6. When you write down the answers to 1–5 on one page, what is the one verb that keeps reappearing under different costumes?

That verb is your origin. Not the job title. The verb.

Questions for the woman who sees (the vision)

Now stand a few steps back from the loom. Take the magic wand the entrepreneur talked about — ten years, anything could be different — and ask:

1. Picture yourself, exactly ten years from this morning. Where are you sitting? Whose house? What is on the desk? What is on the wall? (Sensory only — no nouns like success.)
2. What is the body of work that is finished by then? Not the income. The artifact. Books. Essays. Recordings. Cloth. What is it; how much of it is there?
3. Who reaches out to you that morning, unprompted, and what do they say in the first sentence of the email?
4. What kind of woman has the woman in this picture become? What is she able to do at sixty-one that she could not do at fifty-one? Name two things.
5. What has she stopped doing? (This is often the more important question.)
6. If you could send this woman one sentence today, what would she most need to hear?

Write the answers as a single short paragraph in present tense, as if it were already true. That paragraph is your vision. Pin it where you can see it.

Questions for the woman who tries today (the mission)

Now come back to the loom. The work of the mission is not to declare. It is to do today’s pass.

1. Of the body of work in the vision, what is the very smallest piece you could begin today — something you could finish before the sun goes down?
2. What is the cheapest experiment you could run this week to find out if one assumption inside your vision is actually true? Cheap meaning: no permission needed, no money required, twelve hours or less.
3. Who is one person you could send the result to, by name, by Friday — not to ask for a sale, but to see how they receive it?
4. What would have to be true, by the end of this year, for you to know the thread on your spool was real and not imagined?
5. What is the thing you are afraid to do today not because it is hard, but because doing it will reveal what is real?

That last question is the mission. Almost always.

A template you can fill in

Take a blank page. Write three columns or three sections, in this order.

THE ONE WHO REMEMBERS (origin)
The verb under my life:  ______________________________
What I have always been doing without being paid for it:
  ____________________________________________________
The wound that gave me sight:  _______________________
What I came in from outside of:  _____________________
The practice I have kept with no audience:  __________

THE ONE WHO SEES (vision)
Ten years from this morning, I am ___________________
The body of work that is finished by then is _________
A stranger reaches out to say _________________________
The woman I have become can now _____________________
The woman I have become has stopped _________________
The sentence I would send back to myself today is ____

THE ONE WHO TRIES TODAY (mission)
The smallest piece I can finish today is ___________
The cheapest experiment I will run this week is _____
The person I will send the result to by Friday is ___
What has to be true by year's end for the thread to be real:
  ____________________________________________________
The thing I am afraid to do today because it will reveal
what is real:  _______________________________________

Fill it in by hand. Not in a document. With a pen. Then read it out loud to yourself. Then take a walk. If, walking, any of the answers do not still feel true in your chest, change them. The body is the editor.

Close

The entrepreneur said: if you want to make it, become obsessed. I will say something else.

If you want to make it — and especially if you are over fifty and beginning, and the spool is heavy, and the loom is good, and the time is short and also entirely enough — stop sending any of your three women out of the room. The one who remembers, the one who sees, the one who tries today. They were always there. They have been waiting for you to notice that they are not three personalities you have to assemble; they are three positions of the same body, and the alignment you have been calling not having found my thing was, all along, you starving one of them.

Let her back in this morning.

The cloth will start to appear, line by tight line.