Defective Detective

How do we live in reality right now?
What are our reasons for the things we do? How do we align our actions with our values? How do we should up as our authentic selves? How do we practice sustainable activism? How do we form community? How do we work with internal and external chaos and uncertainty? How do we survive late stage capitalism?
These questions all have a larger impact for disabled, neurodivergent, immunocompromised, and chronically ill people like me. The disability community includes members from all other oppressed groups. Millions of people with Long Covid have now joined us. Covid is a mass disabling event. Climate crisis, pandemics, fascism, and eugenics are intensifying.
Public health and most of the people we love have left us behind. I am full of grief, rage, and despair. What does the future hold for us?
Embodiment is the opposite of oppression. We can uproot our conditioned strengths and limitations. We can trust our bodies to be a compass towards our true and dynamic strengths and limitations. Even if that body has pain, trauma, illness. Through increased connection to our bodies and true selves, we can regulate our emotions and energy better. We can find ways around the limits of language, through creative expression and safe, consensual touch. We can seek the clean pain of full awareness of ourselves and reality.
We can use our emotions, attention, and social connections for our benefit instead of being exploited through them. We can let ourselves be messy and confused and still.. we can act. Creativity and rest are resistance. We can practice accountability to fight the perfectionism of white supremacy. There's no real comfort in denial, avoidance, and apathy.. it's only dirty pain.
Our actions are a vote for the world we want to exist in. Some of us are waiting to find out if we will exist in that world at all.
🎨♿ Special Interest Leaves - a chance to contribute your interests to disabled art!
📚 Books, Books, Baby

Sacred ContractsAlchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make SenseHow Emotions Are MadeThe Wheel of Consent: the Art of Giving and ReceivingFour Thousand WeeksThe Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning🔦 Other Resources
CAT-Q test for autism masking and social camouflageInsight Timer - app for meditations (search Renee Sills or Yoga Nidra)
Psychedelic integration guide and tattoo artist Bear Cunningham

What being disabled and chronically ill has been like for me and how it's affected how I build a company. I talk about consistency, pain, guilt and shame, rumination, and struggling to create. I also include an update of Laboratory de Cake, which will be structuring the podcast like a science paper!
I can't solve the problems we are facing with the pandemic and climate change, maybe none of us can. I hope I can support disabled and chronically ill people to find a better standard of living, with more financial stability and overall freedom. We deserve more and the world can benefit from our talents.
I BELIEVE IN YOU. Please hang in there. 🧡
If you want to connect with me, you can find me @thecakelin on Twitter, Tiktok, and Instagram, and Gmail. I will give free advice to hx excluded identities looking to get into tech or build products (content or apps). Identities: disabled/chronic illness, BIPOC, LGBTQIA.
Schedule time to Ramble Rumble with me on Calendly!
[00:28] Introduction

[00:55] Solving problems... or not

[03:03] Consistency with chronic illness

Mentions: Brianne Benness, host of No End in Sight and NEISvoid

[06:02] Pain and justice sensitivity

[08:26] Guilt and shame

[09:50] Patterns (or how I realized I'm autistic)

[11:05] Am I still running? Rumination

[13:30] Tasty grant failure

[14:33] Defining disability and not selling my story

[18:21] Start where your data is

[19:40] My business hypothesis: self-experiments

Mentions: ikigai, MVPs, no code

[24:14] I have been in the brain struggles

Mentions: Amy Hoy and book Just Fucking Ship

[26:09] The first self-experiment, hopefully

[27:08] Personal data posters and object permanence

[28:52] Experiment pardners: could it be you??

[29:30] Homebase & capitalism concerns (money)

[31:20] Values

[32:24] Research on the harmony of breathing

Mentions: Racket podcasting app

[36:16] Thank you, please leave me a negative review
Image Description For Episode Artwork

[Graphic design image with diagonal split black and white background with many color elements, feels playful and bright. Middle of the image is the title which says “Defective Detective Podcast” half of which is white on black and the other half is black text on white. Black background has colored stars scattered on it.

Top of the image, above the title, is 5 solid circles connected by grey lines. Half is on black background and half on white. One circle in the middle is split by the black and white backgrounds, the purple “body” circle. Circles on black are a red “technology” and a teal “brain”. On the white background is a yellow “relationships” and an orange “society”.

Bottom of the image, under the title, are 5 circles in an unconnected slanted T shape arrangement and with different labels. On black background, the bottom of the T is a teal “laboratory” circle and purple “materials and methods”. The top of the T shape is on white with 3 circles: yellow “introduction”, orange “results”, and red “discussion”.

Upper left corner is the nudges.io logo, an octopus in a beaker with 4 tentacles coming out in yellow, orange, teal, and red. Upper right corner is the cakelin logo, a mix of a hashtag and a slice of cake that has circuits for cake layers, colors are yellow, orange, teal, red, and purple. Lower left corner are the hashtags: @thecakelin, @nudgesio, @detfective.]

My second psychedelic integration helped me redefine and accept concepts that have given me a different sense of freedom and ease in my life. Thank you to my dear friend Jenny for trip sitting, my psychedelic guide and tattoo artist Bear Cunningham, and my darling service pup in training Pepper Ann. I am grateful for the many teachers my life has been touched by.
***Audio lower quality because I didn't use a mic for most of this.
"Because if I can explain what this feeling is like to other people, then maybe they can make the choice to try and embrace it in their life. If I can give other trauma survivors and neurodivergent people, and disabled and chronically ill people, any small amount of peace.. If that is within my power, I will do anything to make it happen."
If you want to connect with me, you can find me @thecakelin on Twitter, Tiktok, and Instagram, and Gmail.
Schedule time to Ramble Rumble with me on Calendly!
[00:00] Processing my recent psilocybin integration trip

[01:16] Interruptions can be invitations

[03:40] My definition of generosity and creativity

[04:31] Love is an action that doesn’t include control

[05:45] Being rescued by a relationship

[07:05] Acceptance and attunement

[08:12] Childhood wounds and experiencing emotions

[08:58] Why I chose Pepper Ann

[10:18] Finding my lost pieces

[11:16] I can’t earn love, because I was always worthy

[11:57] Connection and creativity are attempts

[13:50] Accountability: do no harm

[15:55] Letting go of being emotionally dangerous

[18:29] Connections are mutual, imperfect attempts to understand and be understood

[19:27] Grief and the gift of witnessing or being witnessed with our pain

[21:28] It’s all a choice

[22:14] Feeling and connections are a practice

[23:18] I am choosing to give this shit back, it was never ours

[24:29] My emotions and intensity are an invitation you can RSVP “no” to

[26:45] If it’s within my power

[27:43] What I do for me, I do for you

[28:43] Me and all my selves are figuring it out

[29:24] Awe and gratitude

[30:05] bell hooks and the ripples of creation

[34:16] .. I woke up this way?? Because I’m pickled.

[34:56] The world will be ready when you are

[36:15] Defining attention as a voluntary investment

[37:37] Harmony, contentment, and solitude

[39:52] I’m grateful that you exist and I am working on listening
Image Description For Episode Artwork

[Image of two photos of me, mirrored left and right with a rainbow filter applied that gives a slightly cartoon/unreal vibe.

In both pictures, I, a white nonbinary person with long chin-length mohawk, have a neutral expression. I am sitting with legs underneath me, one hand crossing my body to rest on my thigh. The other hand is touching my patio door, which looks like a mirror in the image. I am dressed with a witchy vibe, wearing a wide brimmed maroon hat, a black hoodie with gold constellations and magical patterns on it, tucked into a sheer skirt with fishnets. My sleeves are slightly rolled up, exposing layers and the tattoo on the forearm that’s touching the glass. I am wearing fake eyelashes, dark purple lipstick, a septum, several ear piercings and a long gold necklace with a circle pendant.

On the left side, I am looking at the glass/middle of the overall image. On the right side, the only difference is I am looking at the camera.]

You're listening to Defective Detective, a podcast about using data to figure out your brain and body. So we can all do the things we want to. I'm your host Cakelin, a disabled and chronically ill founder and scientist. I'll be sharing my own journey towards "health" while interviewing other makers and self-scientists. Here's an introduction to what it's all gonna be about. Huzzah!

This is part 1 of a convo with my sister Sarah about Covid Nudge Cards, discussing what's happening with Covid right now. The next parts will showcase user interviewing.
How do we do user research to build a product that would help people with shared safety and accessibility?
📚 Books
Write Useful Books
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective
Other Resources
IndieHackers