Remembering Mental Health, and the Importance of Being Earnest

One of my favorite comments when I started first appearing in media around the dawn of the Gamestop saga (ages ago in internet time, last month in reality) was along the lines of “I honestly didn’t believe you were a real person, I thought your photo was generated from https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/”. It was innocent and on its face almost a compliment; throughout my life, and especially since I started in trading communities, for one reason or another I was always compared to an AI, usually in an assumably-complimentary way.

Much like our ersatz internet hero of the monomyth Keith Gill (the Roaring Kitty), I am a real person, not a cat. To back up on things, this whole experience since January has felt largely surreal to me, and perhaps surreal to those close to me. It’s not a usual story, by any means.

I wanted to write a post however, explaining that at the end of the day, I am a real person, just like everyone else. My name is Lily Francus, and I was formerly a software engineer in another life, and perhaps a bioinformatics doctoral student in this one. Perhaps a trader, perhaps a quantitative researcher (shameless plug for my own research). I’m not writing this post as some eulogy to myself; in general, I try to live in the world of ideas and not of people. In fact, I want to write this post specifically to dispel some notions others affix to me, and make sure my readers know quite clearly the very human struggles and handicaps I have.