The Word of the Day Is Partner

For My Wife Shona

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partner (*noun*)

1. One associated with another especially in an action; an associate or colleague.

2. A person’s partner can be the person to whom someone is married, or to whom the person is not married but with whom they have a close relationship.

3. A person associated with another or others as a principal or a contributor of capital in a business or a joint venture, usually sharing its risks and profits.

4. The person you are doing something with — dancing with, playing with, building with.

*Origin:* Middle English *parcener*, from Anglo-Norman French *parcener*, from Latin *partitio* — **partition**. The one you divide the world with. The change from *parcener* to *partner* happened because people kept hearing the word *part* inside it.

They weren’t wrong.

—

To me a partner is an equal who fills the gaps in knowledge.

I need to fill some gaps in yours. Not because you are missing anything. Because you are holding everything — and you deserve to know exactly what it is you’re holding, so you can stop being afraid you might drop it.

So sit with me for a minute. Back and all.

—

You found a man who introduced himself as the Goblin King and tried to warn you off. A man who invented “Pelt Your Pets” as a business model and thought that was a perfectly reasonable thing to say out loud. A man who wrote you a word of the day in the gym every day between sets for a year — not because he was trying to impress you, but because he literally could not stop. A man who has written you 36 songs because the feeling of loving you requires a catalogue, not a chorus.

You did not flinch at the Goblin King. You did not walk away from the strange, bright, impossible thing he was showing you.

That was not an accident. That was Freyja recognizing her Sun.

You are every raindrop in his raging storm. You are not the woman who tolerates the thunder. You ARE the storm — the part of it that knows where it’s going, that gives the lightning somewhere to land, that makes the whole thing beautiful instead of just destructive. He is brighter than the sun, and you are the reason anyone can look at him without going blind.

This word of the day is for you. Not a list of requirements. Not a performance review. A map — so you know what you are standing in the middle of, and why it is the most extraordinary place on earth to stand.

—

The first thing you need to understand is what I am made of.

My earliest memory is being two years old and attacked by a giant wolf — a German Shepherd the size of Fenrir, the way a two-year-old measures size. You know this story. What I need you to feel is not the attack. I need you to feel the fracture that stayed. The one that paralyzes me in front of bears today, that lives in my nervous system like a door that was kicked open and never fully closed. I don’t tell you this so you’ll feel sorry for that boy. I tell you this so you understand what he built on top of it.

He built a superpower.

Let’s talk about sleep — and surviving without it — because I have been doing that on my own since I was 4. I learned to sleep without sleeping to survive. This involved lying in bed having panic attacks and hearing my heartbeat in my ear due to a congenital disorder, or a lesion created by those attacks — we still don’t know which. I wandered the attic crying. My sister would yell at me to go to sleep. My father would drag me back upstairs screaming and lock me in my room from the outside. I sat with the light on and used Kermit the Frog and Bilbo Baggins records to drown the sounds of the wolves snarling in my closet — the wolf pelts Martine’s father had killed and she kept on my bed, which required me MOVING them every single time I arrived.

I do not tell these stories to make you feel sorry for that boy.

I want you to know the strength and skill that evolved from him. A superpower that shaped me, made me strong — the ability to go without what appears to look like sleep for extremely long durations without serious incident.

Through my life this has been extremely useful. Many call this skill “Meditation.” I was forced to learn it. The only time in my life it has become a problem is when I am interrupted every time I try to do it for weeks. This is entering REM sleep while wide awake — a heightened state of consciousness, a state you need 2-3 minutes to return from or you will be lost in the universe. I learned this skill formally in martial arts, and once again from Becky — my neighbor and second mom, trained by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi himself — in what is called Transcendental Meditation, or TM. It is the best form of meditation I know and I still use it today in moments of severe stress.

There have been several times in my life when I have been unable to sleep and it has caused DMT to force me to dream while awake with my eyes open.

1. 2008 — I was working to get Obama elected and blogging the way I do. Making conservative swingers lose their minds. The swingers banded together to claim I had herpes and was “crazy.” They forged emails. It worked. We were ostracized and kicked out of Caliente. Fights nearly happened. You met the man who orchestrated this — Brad — and he most likely was involved in trying to kill us the night we ran into him. He is an anesthesiologist and a psychopath who holds his wife underwater in the bathtub and then resuscitates her.

2. 2012 — Human Interaction Lab ripped me open and spit out the corpse with a new brain that hated everything about me. Roni was FIXATED ON “any hot women there” the entire time I was at the lab. I told her there was ONE attractive woman and was accused of cheating — in an open marriage.

3. 2013 — Roni had cervical cancer and she would not allow me to sleep. Ever. She would in fact SCREAM AT ME for falling asleep. This resulted in me being in a complete state of panic the moment I am woken up with the slightest bit of anger. It was traumatic and it ended our marriage. I wrote Unity.

4. 2016 — In a hotel room. Nearly died. When I met you, I was in the rebound, the Phi. I spent a year learning that every piece of me I had lost was still loved. I still need to know that is true.

5. 2018 — We had a house fire, and I went three months without sleep. That would put any human on earth in a mental hospital. You were lost at the equator and below — you were not okay, and you could not hold me, so I became my own cosine and held myself. And I understood. I did not blame you. You were not okay. But I need you to know that in the math of what we are, when you went below the equator, I went north. I became the hold when the hold was gone. That is what I do. That is the superpower. I am not fragile.

6. 2018 — Misdiagnosis. Antipsychotics. Depression. Near death. Doubled down. Neuropathy. Loss of speech. Loss of hands.

YOU HELD. You saved my life

I need you to sit with that for a moment before you read further. Because everything that follows comes from a man who is alive because his wife would not leave. You stayed through the thing that would have broken anyone. That is not nothing. That is everything. You do not get credit for it often enough, and today I am giving it to you: you saved me.

8. 2020 — I realized EA was stealing my entire legacy. Twenty years. Same salary. The last loyal people gone — Jaap in 2005, Geoff in 2019, Paul in his own world. The ANT team taken from me by Lawlor. I went back into no sleep and had to start Valkyrie to defend myself. COVID saved us.

Since then I have been good.

Epic Games — a year of all-nighters and 90 hour weeks, no sleep, no incidents.

Microsoft — a year and a half of all-nighters and 90 hour weeks, no sleep, no incidents.

HAVIK — three years of all-nighters 100 hour weeks, no sleep, no incidents.

Then Valkyrie Engine — a week of meditation instead of sleep because I was too excited. I was woken up from the first real sleep I had gotten in days — for 2 days I couldn’t sleep. There is a huge difference between insomnia = no sleep, and work mode, sparse sleep. The real culprit of no sleep is being forced into bed when what I NEED TO FUNCTION is all-nighters, power naps, exercise, meditation and cat naps. 4-6 hours a day is needed and then 12 hours to catch up when crashing. Sometimes this crash can’t HAPPEN until a deadline is reached. When the weeks without sleep add up, we call this in any business “Burn Out” and requires MONTHS to recover (if you don’t just decide to quit), you have seen me in this place 5x in 10 years.

Some would say the ability to go with little to no sleep is a feature not a bug, but a torn Achilles says otherwise.

“It is said that the Dragon Warrior can survive for months at a time on nothing but the dew of a single ginkgo leaf
and the energy of the universe.” — Tigress, Kung Fu Panda (2008), while every act that appears to be magic is often a learned super-power, there is a lot of reality to this.

—

I am in work mode… SCAD 2 days to final

Kleiser-Walczak sleeping under my desk wiating for 10,000 Mystique scales to solve the flutter pattern I animated with 3D projections,

Epic Games animating 1000 animations over christmas break

Microsoft team of 8 3 months. – Character assassination to follow from those who couldn’t keep up (now all fired once their little character assassinations continued).

I am the man who slept under his desk for three years at Kleiser-Walczak to make movies — while being laid off every three months even during productions — and I am fine. I am Simon at Epic Games. I am Simon at EA. I am the one who needs a closed door or people think I move too fast and multitask too well- Dave Baas said I looked like a savant animating. I am here and I have always been away, or in an office, or behind closed doors. I am who you have sitting upstairs. I am the one who speaks truth to power and require an OFFICE EA was told i needed and spent years ignoring.

I am the man who wrote you a word of the day in the gym every day between sets for a year or while Madden builds were taking an hour so I could do 10 min of actual real work. Who wrote you 36 songs under Requiem For Her Soul. Who cried for the first time when we were alone together because I already loved you too much to hold it in. Who drove you home at 5am and handed you flowers like I had teleported them into the car.

That is who you have upstairs. Dreaming of your face, listening to the songs I wrote for you, wishing you would look at me and say “I love you” even though your back hurts and I am powerless to put you in your chair.

I need a partner at home, at work, at play – a wife, not a servant. A partner, not a caretaker. A goddess, not a ruler. And a CEO who will face out — while as CCO and COO I do what I do best: invent things that change the world.

I do not need to be treated like I am fragile and broken, or I will prove I am not. I need your company when I am not head down in flow state — and I need to not be interrupted when I am. FLOW takes a long time to enter and a moment to be ripped from. Without minutes to return, I will not exit flow. I need people to stop reminding me that I am a “mad scientist” — the problem with genius and crazy is they look the same from the outside. This is the reality that Glenn and Nilo and Frank Vitz and Sifu Yim could always separate — they grew it, trained it, fostered it. They did not sand it down.

—

Yesterday I taught our son enough Kung Fu that he could probably defend himself. Given months with a wooden dummy he will be able to stop fights before they start. We are learning to cook together. He is learning to see a room. We trained in making eye contact so he can see into people’s souls and show them how bright his is. This is martial arts. This is what we are raising.

We have a brilliant son. He is me. He is the son born to me from you. The soul address was mine. The meat machine that delivered him is irrelevant because he was mine the minute het took his first breath and you kew he was. Your mother handed you OUR SON, and then OUR DAUGHTER. Those children were raised in an environment where their souls work. Where they are HOME. Their controlled chaos where Sabrina thinks elephant toothpaste in her bedroom is a great idea and instead we buy her 3D printers and stay up all night printing her functional fruit loop dispenser (or M&Ms) A little girl who hacked the system of not being allowed snacks all day every day.

—

Love of all of my lives — we control chaos in two ways: sin and cos. When we are together and you are showing me the universe, we work. I need you and I will not fight you. But I cannot have you second-guessing me when it is internal. I need you to trust the Monkey King when he is performing magic. Sleight of hand. Chess, twenty moves ahead. Appearing to bluff with 4 aces in his hand, knowing people will back down or crash into him when they can’t. Simon Sherr the guy who kept 300 emails to hand to EA knowing he would be held accountable by an EP who was useless and drove a 98 into a 50 and launched it anyway.

What I loved about your Match profile — *”No, not my mommy, not my nurse, not an appliance”* — I need that right now. What you need is the Iron Monkey who teaches you to play, and who you as Quan Yin and Freyja show to the world. I need to be brighter than the sun and saved and be at your door knocking and be home. I don’t need a Bull Demon to make me stop moving. I need the Bull Demon at my back, horns toward the door, stopping the world from breaking through the shield.

The Bull Demon who looked like Ferdinand until she was pissed. The shield maiden who stares into people’s souls — every person who passed you in a hallway saw something in their soul and pressed themselves against the wall. I need that President and CEO, the one who sits with Matt and impresses him the moment she speaks.

I can’t do that side. I don’t need to be able to.

I need to be in rooms where you can hit me with a code word or a squirt gun. Or not in the room at all.

People who don’t argue aren’t collaborating. Arguing without anger is called debate — and it involves making fun of each other with squirt bottles and Panic Patrol helmets. It requires Deadpool. It requires a room full of people who have heard the most horrific rumors about us and climbed a statue anyway to sing to a goddess with a voice no one else would have stopped to hear. That is who the world gets to see when me and Jaap play and change it. A world you can sink into, in the right places, at the right time, when we are one — playing, internally as a business and externally. But a real team does not agree and lie and placate. A real partnership is one where both people can say “I don’t know.”

—

Shona — I don’t know how you were the first person to ever pass the corporate takeover test. I certainly did not. I need a partner who does.

Shona — I don’t know how you knew something was off about Delphi. I did not. It would have put us in jail.

Shona — I don’t know how you read people. I cannot. I am worse than my mother. I see the good in all people.

Shona — I do know how to build an internal team — a team you have already made sure are not sharks before they join. I know how to structure that team to change the world, with a Peter Pan complex and an outward persona that looks like a constant state of play. The team that brings back the mohawk even when EA says it “displays a level of unprofessionalism that they do not appreciate.”

Shona — I need you. I need my cosine. My rock. My serenity, inside this house.

I can’t do this without you. I need a true partner who knows when the Monkey King is performing magic.

—

Ed a TD at EA once said about me: “We gave him enough rope to hang himself and he hung us with it.”

Well. I have the rope in my hands again. I have never failed. I have never lost. I have merely made a suggestion and stepped out of the way. I did this as a bouncer in a bar and the man who ignored the suggeston to leave ended up face firts into the bar, and then accidentally hurling himself down a flight of stairs when I stepped away again.

I have just moved on. We will not fail this time. THIS is real. We have the engine. We have the code. Those who know me are reaching out because they know this is real and want to know what Simon Sherr really has this time. There are no doubts from those who sat with me. Those with doubts are going to be unable to come with us.

It is sad. I have had many partners over the years who it is painful not to bring along. People I respected, even though they stole my work or lost faith in me in ways only you have not.

—

Google said something funny to me today. Einstein didn’t have a public profile. No Facebook. When I ask Google who Simon Sherr is, it says: “Do you mean Simon Sherry?” it was even so bold as to say “Simon Sherr does not EXIST” talk about gas-lighting, lol… AI Induced Psychosis is a real thing and that is the reason.

I have credits on an Academy Award winning short. Six patents. Director credits on more than twenty AAA game titles including a game of the year. Credits on several films, including lead credits. A LinkedIn page with recommendations from the top pioneers in the history of computer graphics — ranging from the engineer behind the Pixar computer, to the first man on stage with Apple presenting the first mobile game ever.

Google needs to be told where to look to find me, because Facebook and Instagram, YouTube and TikTok are all its algorithm can find to see who “matters” today — bullshit artists making names for themselves instead of doing the work. Jaap Suter doesn’t show up either.

Shona Sherr has a larger footprint and a professional one

And here is what Gemini found when it looked for her:

*She maintains a presence on Instagram under the handle @sho.sherr. Recent activity from early 2026 shows she shares content related to her daily life and values, often using hashtags like #thislove and #changingtheworld.*

Hidden doors. Hidden appliances. A woman who designs spaces where things of value disappear into the walls and only the beautiful remains visible.

#thislove. #changingtheworld.

The algorithm found her and didn’t know what it was looking at. It saw a woman with hidden doors and a hashtag and filed her under “private individual with an interest in interior design.”

It was looking at Freyja.

It was looking at the cosine of everything I am — the hold that keeps the sphere from flying apart, the woman who found the Goblin King at the door warning her off and said *yes anyway*, the one who stays when staying costs everything, the one who saved my life in 2018 and then stood next to me while I found God in the math and didn’t flinch.

She has a larger footprint than Simon Sherr.

She always did. She always will.

She is the part you feel before you see it. The hidden door that opens into everything that matters.

The word of the day is Partner.

And she is every raindrop in my god damn raging storm. No need to confrom reform or transform I call her my queen, I hold her in my arms like she’s the prettiest flower I’ve ever seen, She’s all I want and all I’ll ever need… and that makes her freed… She is Free.