People talk a lot about the grind of startup life. They rarely talk about the days the grind breaks you.
If I have been quiet on here lately, it is because the last few weeks have been brutal.
A few weeks ago, I found myself in the ER at 2:00 AM with three tears in my rotator cuff, two slipped discs in my neck, and a pinched nerve. The pain was excruciating, relieved only by intense pain medication that completely knocked me out. I went from running a company to being physically incapacitated in the blink of an eye.
At the same time, my family was plunged into an unimaginable season of grief. My husband lost his father. Then my younger cousin was read her last rites. She passed away just a week ago, leaving behind two beautiful young children.
Grief is heavy under any circumstances. When you are in excruciating pain and barely conscious from medication, it can feel impossible to carry.
In the middle of all of this, I was scheduled to step onto a virtual stage for a pitch competition. I had poured my soul into preparing for it. It was the opportunity I had been waiting for, but my body made the choice for me. I had to pull out at the very last minute.
When life hits you from every possible angle and takes away opportunities you worked so hard to create, it is incredibly tempting to pack it all up and walk away. You think to yourself “Maybe it’s just not meant to be”.
But I keep coming back to why I started.
I am building Pistachio Pay because I desperately need it to exist. Truly. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about how much I need this product. I am building a trauma-informed financial platform because I know exactly what it feels like to be overwhelmed, exhausted, and failed by systems that were not built for people whose brains process information differently.
As long as I still need this product, I have to keep building. As long as millions of neurodivergent adults are paying the hidden cognitive tax of a broken financial system, we have to keep going.
I do not have a tidy lesson to pull from any of this. Some seasons are simply brutal. This one has forced me to slow down, but it has not changed what I know:
Pistachio Pay needs to exist.
The mission is clear, and the vision has not changed. That remains true, even now. 💚
Money should work with your brain.
Pistachio Pay is being built to reduce the mental load of money management for neurodivergent adults.