Category Archives: Mental health

Post Book Stress Disorder

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In sports there is a concept known as The Yips. It’s a condition that affects experienced athletes where they develop spasms in fine motor movements that impact their game in a profound way. It’s generally in culture ascribed to the athlete letting their head get in the way. They begin to overthink things too much. It interferes with their movements, causing them to do poorly. This creates a negative feedback loop where they are doing badly because they’re thinking too much, which causes them to think even more and do even more badly. It can completely destroy an athlete’s career.

Back when I started with tech, I didn’t have a lot of experience with programming, but I did have a lot of experience with writing and speaking. I delivered radio news for three years. I had a journalism degree. I knew that I could present and deliver information in a clear concise way. The big problem I had was that I was limited in what information I understood that I could present.

I had the opportunity to write several books early in my career that I felt very proud of. These were generally introductory books, which contain information that tends to be easier and more fun to present.

That changed two years ago when I was given the opportunity to write a book on Metal. I felt very strongly that I could learn and explain Metal in a way that was understandable because I was coming at this as a beginner. Everyone I spoke to who knew Metal was someone who was very familiar with OpenGL and didn’t really understand what a beginner would not know about. There was a lot of unfamiliar terminology that you need to have a good grasp of in order for Metal to be useful. I had a lot of confidence that I could present this information in a presentable way to people with no graphics background.

During the process of writing the book, I didn’t really have time to think about what I was actually trying to do. I was laser focused on accomplishing one task at a time until the book was done. It was an intense but satisfying experience to watch as my small steps added up to a full book.

I needed a break from writing, so I didn’t blog much or work on a book in 2018. During that year, I had some time to think. And the thoughts I had weren’t very pleasant.

When I completed the book I was proud of what I was able to accomplish in the time I had available. I felt that it would take two years to write a good book on Metal. I had about ten months. I didn’t have time/resources for the number of graphics I wanted for the book or the amount of sample code I originally planned for. When I finished I felt that I had had the minimal amount of time to write a book that I would not be embarrassed by. But not being embarrassed by something is vastly different from being proud of it.

There are several chapters of the book that my tech reviewers were deeply disappointed in. One of them has blocked me on Twitter. The other one will not speak to me. I don’t know if this is a reflection on them or on me. I don’t really understand socially what happened and it upsets me to know my peers do not like or respect me.

I have begun second guessing myself on the book. I don’t know if I presented the information well. I keep worrying that people who read the book are judging me and deciding the book was bad and that I exposed myself as a fraud who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

I finally began reading through the book the Wenderlich’s published on Metal after having to get over my fears of it being far better book than my book was. I think it’s a better book than mine and they cover a lot of the material in a much more comprehensive manner than I cover my material, but I also feel the book is incredibly dense. I only understand the material presented because I took off nearly a year to fully understand Metal to the point of writing my own book. I don’t want that to come off as bitchy or dismissive of their book because it’s full of a lot of great information. It’s a great book for me and I am grateful that it exists, but I do wonder how much help it is to people without the same background I have.

I have begun to worry that this material is completely unpresentable. That there is no way to simply explain things to new users. This is causing me to second guess my ability to present any information about anything. I don’t know if I actually was ever good at presenting information or if it was just hubris on my part.

I am considering writing another book on a far less complex topic than Metal, but I am wondering if I have anything to contribute to that topic. I am wondering if I should bother writing anything because I don’t know if I can present information clearly in a way that people find useful. I also don’t know if anyone gives a crap about the things I want to talk about because it’s not about algorithms or cross platform JavaScript frameworks or network protocols. This is causing me a lot of depression and anxiety.

I don’t know if I should take this as a sign to give up on writing technical books or if I need to jump back in so that I can get over this. I keep going back and forth. Some days I am super enthused about the idea of writing a book from my own perspective. Other times I feel like I am just copying work other people have done but in a much less compelling way.

I feel the urge to hide. I don’t want to talk to or deal with anyone. I want to be left alone. I want to just work on crappy little projects that will never earn money that I do for myself because I have given up on the idea that I have anything of value to contribute to the tech community.

I keep trying to tell myself that completing the Metal book was an accomplishment. I wrote that book in less than a year. I wrote it by myself. I got up every day and stuck to a plan and shipped something. It’s not perfect. But for better or worse it’s presented in the way I felt it should be presented. This was a challenge and I don’t know if there is a right or wrong way to present difficult materials.

My hope is that anyone who reads the book and is disappointed by the content that they at least understand that I worked hard and did what I thought was right. I did the best I could under the circumstances that I was given. I don’t know if I would have done things any differently had I to go back and do it over again. But now I have to deal with wondering where I stand and what I have to contribute to the community.

The Fallacy of Logic

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Over the last 24 hours I have had several upsetting exchanges with people. I was dumb and responded to a notorious Twitter troll because I had just woken up and was angry and behaved impulsively. Later that day, I had someone I didn’t know call me out on it and demand that I logically defend my behavior. They told me if I was going to state my opinion online I should expect some backlash and be prepared to defend my point of view.

I got very upset and told this person that if they thought I was an irrational bitch that was just fine with me. This person got incredibly offended and told me not to put words in his mouth. He continued to fight with me until I broke down upset. In order to preserve peace with the rest of the people in the chat room who had witnessed this exchange, I apologized to them for engaging in this argument. The person who started it misunderstood who the apology was for and thanked me for apologizing to him. This action has made me physically ill and prevented me from sleeping much last night.

I have been rolling around in my head why this exchange upset me so badly. I wonder if I am unreasonable. I wonder why the hell this person felt that verbally attacking me on a chat room was perfectly fine but me implying he thought I was a bitch was simply beyond the pale and a bridge too far.

I have had a number of these kinds of exchanges over the last year. I noticed that people became incredibly hostile during the 2016 Presidential election. I had hoped that things would die down after that, but if nothing else, they’ve gotten worse. I had to deactivate my Facebook account because I was being attacked by people for not sharing their exact specific political beliefs. I have left multiple Slack rooms this year because one person out of 50-100 will lay into me about how my observations of sexism and discrimination do not fit in with their experiences as young white men who have computer science degrees who live in San Francisco.

None of these people are evil. I know several of them are generally nice people, but the way they engage me upsets me greatly. I feel like a rattlesnake frantically rattling my tail to warn them not to step on me. I don’t like being stepped on and biting them takes a lot out of me. They’re always surprised when they get bitten and decide that I am not behaving rationally and they get quite angry. I cut a lot of these people off because I simply can’t deal with them anymore.

I have been told that some of these people I have cut off are saying I am paranoid. They are saying I am mentally ill and I am destroying relationships with all my allies and one has gone as far as to say I am a sociopath.

I don’t want toxic people in my life. Life is short. I love cooking. I love my dogs. I love to write books even though they stress the living crap out of me sometimes. I feel like the world is this vast sea of endless possibilities and things to learn and explore. Then I get dragged down by the reality of trying to interact with other people who want to fight with me about Swift equivalents of vim versus emacs. These people drain all of my optimism and turn me into an angry bitter person that I don’t like being.

I have been trying to figure out why I am not allowed to simply withdraw from interactions I find unpleasant. I am not allowed to simply retract whatever the offending statement is. It is demanded that I defend it to the death and give up my precious spoons arguing with someone who is never going to be convinced that they are wrong.

I believe it is a fallacy of logic.

My ex-husband was an atheist. He said he would not believe in anything that couldn’t be proven with science. He said if Neil Degrasse Tyson says it’s true, then it must be so. Once he verbally assaulted me in the car to the point I was planning to jump out of the moving vehicle for saying “God bless you” to a stranger in public.

I am not an atheist. I would consider myself a Christian except I do things like read Tarot cards that I am pretty sure Christians see as witchcraft. I get very strong feelings about things that I know to be true but I have no evidence for their existence. When I was an atheist for ten years I would ignore these feelings and ignoring them always got me in trouble. I had a stranger talk his way into my dorm room and even though I had a bad feeling about him, I couldn’t think of a logical response to his argument that I should let him in. He raped me so badly I now have PTSD. My life was not on a good track and my world felt quite grey and empty. I decided ten years ago to believe in God, even though I had no evidence for his existence. I decided to trust those gut feelings i had been ignoring for ten years because they weren’t rational and to have faith that they were leading me to a better place.

I read a book many years ago called “Blink!” by Malcolm Gladwell where he talks about how our unconscious mind works much faster than our conscious mind does. It’s like having a background thread and a main thread. We can instinctively know something without being able to consciously and verbally explain it. I have faith in these feelings in spite of lack of evidence and I believe in them deeply. I have discovered most people in tech are not like this.

Emotions are not rational. We have been trained as a society to scorn anything that isn’t rational and can’t be explained very simply with logic. Any time I have a discussion with someone who doesn’t agree with me, they have a long list of talking points with very simple ideas that they use to try and convince you that you’re wrong. A lot of these people are simply unwilling to believe that you can see where they are coming from and still disagree with them.

I remember in college having boys try to logically explain to me why I should have sex with them. I was dumb and at the time I thought I could reason with them, but any arguments I made with them only gave them another argument point they could use to try and reason with me about why I should have sex. I would tell them I found them unattractive. They would say “Well I don’t find you attractive either! But sex is fun!” They were so invested in getting the result they wanted that it was completely useless to argue with them and the only course of action you had was to just walk away and hope they found someone else who is less work.

That is what the tech industry feels like to me some days.

I am not allowed to have my finely honed sense of intuition about anything because everything must be an argument. I can’t say that I don’t want to interact with someone who persists in arguing with me about nothing because that makes me a bad person. It doesn’t matter that these arguments destroy my ability to function. I am expected to have them because if I simply refuse no one knows how to respond.

Everyone is invested in believing that whatever they believe is right and correct and they have constructed intricate logical facts around supporting that believe. If someone doesn’t agree with them, they feel it is a personal attack on their core sense of self. They defend it to the death and feel that they are doing nothing wrong in behaving this way.

There was an interesting study recently that showed that most men will say that rape is wrong. They will swear up and down that they would never rape anyone. But then laster in the survey they admitted to forcing a woman to have sex that they knew did not want to have sex. There is a fundamental disconnect in their brains between the word “rapist” and what it means to rape someone.

We have a lot of labels for people that are not nice. Racist. Sexist. Rapist. Nazi. No one wants to be associated with being a racist even if they have racist beliefs. Calling someone a racist is seen as being similar to calling someone a bitch. It’s lost all meaning other than as a name you can call someone to try and make them feel bad about themselves. They don’t want to be called a racist. They think that their racist beliefs are rational and can logically be explained and that someone who is a racist hates for no reason and therefore can’t be them.

I hate to break it to you, but feelings are irrational. We feel the way we do based on things we can’t really explain. We are a result of decades of experiences and neurochemical reactions. I know people who got slighted by someone when they were seven years old and that one experience still angers them to this day. My father is still angry at being slighted by someone forty years ago who died in a terrible car accident thirty years ago.

We’re all giant bundles of irrational behaviors. I just wish that we were better at accepting that sometimes there isn’t a logical explanation for why we feel the way we do. We’re all entitled to our own perspective on something without feeling like the existence of a different perspective threatens our own.

If someone is triggering my PTSD symptoms and doing something I find threatening, I am entitled to end that conversation. I should not have to suffer flashbacks because someone finds it fun and engaging to get involved in an endless argument over nothing. You don’t get to argue with me that what you’re doing wouldn’t bother 99% of the rest of the population. It bothers me. If you persist in behavior that I perceive as threatening I have the right to cut you off to protect myself mentally. If you know that what you are doing is upsetting me and you persist in doing it, you are harassing me. My right to feel safe is greater than your right to argue with me. I don’t care if you agree with me or not. I am entitled to my own perspective just as you are entitled to yours. Agree to disagree and get a beer with me later. Or call me a bitch. I would vastly prefer that to the death of a thousand cuts of being forced to explain why I feel differently than you do while looking for a way to escape.

Moneyball: The Art of Scouting Programming Talent

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Back when I was in London I suffered from a nasty bout of food poisoning. I wound up spending a lot of time in bed hiding in my hotel room. I got bored and looked for something to watch on TV. A channel was playing the movie Moneyball.

I am not a huge baseball fan, but I am interested in data and statistics, so I started watching it not really knowing if I was going to like it or not. It wound up captivating me in a way I didn’t think it would.

It was less about the statistic and more about the story of the central protagonist, team manager Billy Beane. Billy was scouted for the major leagues as a high school student and signed to join the Mets at age 17. His career was lackluster and he never really lived up to his potential.

The movie only briefly covered this backstory, but it fascinated me. Why had he not lived up to his potential? Did he just peak too early? What happened?

I finally bit the bullet and bought the book the movie was based on and I got a better overall explanation of what happened. Billy Beane was one of the most intelligent kinesthetic learners of the century. He was capable of doing things no one else thought possible and making them look easy. His physical talent and capabilities were beyond question.

The issue was his mind.

He never learned to cope with failure. As a high school student, he was always so much better than everyone else that failure was never something he thought much about. When he started playing against people older and more experienced than he was, he would strike out and his batting average dropped. He was unable to cope with this failure, so it manifested in explosive rage and he developed an inability to perform. If his first at-bat went poorly he was done for the rest of the game. He was afraid of embarrassment. He modified his batting to try and not strike out as often, but it worked against his natural athletic gifts. The only person keeping Billy from being a super star was Billy himself.

This story really strikes a chord with me. I speak somewhat openly about having mental health issues. I have had multiple jobs over the last few years where the work environment destroyed my ability to function. I would sob because I knew the programming knowledge to do a task was locked away in a safe somewhere in my mind and I could not access it because my mental health was in shambles. It’s so hard to tell someone that this isn’t you. You know you can do better, but you just can’t right now because your mind is interfering with your ability to function.

Over the years I have learned some coping skills. I know how I work best and I try as best I can to tell people I work for how I work so that they don’t break me. Some of them respect that. A lot of them don’t. I honestly don’t understand why a company would spend so much money on programmers and then make dick moves that destroy their effectiveness. The only explanation I have is that they don’t think of programmers as people. We’re a disposable resource. We’re like race horses. They are all excited about us until we break a leg, then they take us out back and shoot us and go out and buy a new one.

There was another aspect of the book that resonated with me. I have had very bad experiences with jobs where I feel like the people who hired me are waiting for me to fail. They look for any indication that I misrepresented myself or that there is some reason I can’t do what they want and they cut their losses and let me go. I see other people who are completely incompetent who linger forever and continue to get another chance in spite of their past record of failures.

One of the points of the book was talking about how baseball scouting has always been done. A bunch of guys will travel around watching high school baseball games looking for talent. They have a preconceived notion of what a star baseball player looks like. He has to be tall and muscular and have the right look. He has to have the right tools. He has to have a presence.

There was a whole chapter about the scouts sitting down with the economist who did the statistics going over who the scouts wanted and who the economist wanted. Most of the players the economist wanted horrified the scouts. They were all too fat, or not tall enough, or they would throw funny. It didn’t matter what their past statistics said about their ability, they didn’t have the right look. The scouts couldn’t imagine them being the next big thing.

Billy Beane was allowed to languish in baseball for ten years in spite of a poor track record of success because he had the right look. Everyone was waiting for him to shake off whatever was wrong with him so that he could be the player everyone imagined he could be. Baseball scouting is less about what someone has done and more about what you can imaging them becoming.

This applies so much to technology as well. We have the myth of the 20-year-old programmer in a hoodie who writes code that changes the world. We have ingrained in ourselves what we think a programmer is and how they’re supposed to look and act. If you’re a venture capitalist, you’re not looking at a track record of past success, you’re looking for someone that feels right. You look at what you imaging that person can be rather than who they are.

Having several failed start ups is seen as a bonus, but only if you’re the right kind of person. People are willing to keep giving you chances because they have a gut feeling that you are going to become something even though you have no past track record to back it up.

If you’re black, or female, or trans, or some other underrepresented minority group, it’s harder for venture capitalists to imagine what you could become. It doesn’t matter as much if you have a solid business plan or if you’re doing something no one else is doing. If it’s something that is outside of their scope of understanding, you’re not going to sell them of the fantasy of being Peter Theil investing in Facebook.

This is a larger problem even beyond the scope of who gets funding and who doesn’t. We are sold on the idea that a programmer looks and acts a certain way. Everyone has to be a 10x programmer. Everyone has to work 80 hours a week. Everyone has to be passionate. Everyone has to keep learning the next hot thing because if you don’t you’ll be left behind. Everyone has to be under the age of 30 because young people are smarter.

No one can ever be wrong. No one can ever admit to not knowing something.

I think one reason we have so many toxic hostile arguments about code is for many of the same reasons Billy Beane did not pan out as a baseball player. People can’t ever be wrong. People can’t fail. Our self worth is wrapped up in being the smartest guy in the room. We can’t tolerate ideas that are different from our own because if we’re wrong, then who are we? Are we those losers who refused to learn object-oriented programming in the 90’s who can’t find jobs now? Are we those people we make fun of who write JavaScript and copy and paste code from Stack Overflow?

I think we make the mistake of thinking that a lot of the toxic behaviors we see come from a place of strength. It’s quite the opposite. It comes from a place of fear. We fear being displaced. We fear being wrong. We lash out at minorities because we benefit from looking like what a programmer should look like and the fewer people we have to compete with, the easier it is to be at the top of the heap (or the stack).

I have had people who are less talented than I am sabotage me at work because they see their job as a zero sum game. You are either the smartest person at the office or you are not. It’s a competition. If someone knows more than you do, then it diminishes your sense of self and you must get rid of the person who is challenging your identity.

We are limiting what people are capable of by forcing them to put on a facade that they are never wrong. We are creating a more toxic environment by conforming to these ideas of what a programmer is supposed to look like. We think we’re special unique snowflakes, but we’re not. This is a problem everywhere.

We need to stop breaking people by trying to force them to conform to a mold that was set fifteen years ago. We need to be open to people who look different and have different ideas. We need to stop making people feel inadequate if they are not the smartest person in the room. We need to stop being hostile to people who are different and waiting for them to fail while giving a pass to the people who look like us because we imaging what they could be. That’s a fantasy, not reality. They’ll never become what they’re capable of if we don’t challenge them to think differently.

Helping Hands

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Back in November I disconnected my Facebook account. I had hoped that when the 2016 presidential election was over that people would be able to go back to talking about life as we knew it. I missed talking about computer programming and science fiction. Every single day was filled with anxiety by everyone about what the future would bring. Things got progressively worse after the election in a way I didn’t think was possible. I had people who voted the same way I did viciously attacking me for not completely supporting their views 100%. It got too demoralizing to deal with everyone anymore because everyone was so angry that I simply quit. I couldn’t deal with it anymore.

This left me rather lonely. I started writing a book back in October. I find it difficult to leave my house regularly without completely exhausting myself. I certified my pug Delia as a service animal because I found dealing with the outside world too difficult to cope with. I don’t have any local friends anymore and it’s difficult to find people to hang out with.

Back in March I had two rather intimidating conferences I was attending. One was GDC. The other one was iOSCon 2017. This post is about my experiences with these conferences and how important our community is to me.

GDC 2017

GDC is by far the largest conference I have ever been to. I was fortunate enough to be accepted as a conference associate. I got to attend the conference in exchange for helping to make sure the conference runs smoothly. My first conference was Snow*Mobile in Madison. The organizers of that conference let me attend the conference in exchange for volunteering to help run the conference. I got to hand out conference badges and meet the speakers and it was an invaluable experience. I always prefer to not just attend a conference and I was incredibly grateful to be accepted as a conference associate.

Delia and I greeting at GDC. People asked where the pug was later and were sad she wasn’t a fixture at the front.

I was also afraid.

I was afraid if I told them that I had a service animal that they would think I would be unable to perform my CA duties. I should have been up front and told them immediately, but I figured if it wasn’t okay to bring Delia that I would leave her home and try to find a way to cope.

I didn’t need to be worried. Everyone in the CA program was absolutely fantastic about having Delia there. She and I were accepted by everyone. A lot of people took comfort in having her around and it really made that conference special to me. I love my pug, but I am biased. I worried that people would think that I was pulling a con and I wasn’t really disabled because I don’t have a physical disability. I worry that people think I am like Paris Hilton carrying my dog around just because I have privilege rather than her being something that helps me cope with crowded noisy situations. Having so many people enjoy having her around really touched me in a profound way.

Someone was spoiled with all the pettings.

Getting to attend GDC was a life changing experience for me. I met some of the greatest people ever. I feel incredibly blessed to have been able to connect with such a fantastic group of positive and accepting people. One of the big things they look for in a CA is someone who is friendly and positive. A lot of people there acted as mentors to students trying to break into the game industry. The CAs were a creative and colorful group of people. I felt like I could completely be myself and that it was just fine. I take pride in my weirdness and my craziness, but I do feel a lot of pressure to tone it down and conform at iOS conferences.

When I got home after the conference I felt surprisingly energized. I realized when I got home that I hadn’t heard anyone talking about politics or arguing about it for the past week. Everyone I interacted with was positive and happy to be there. I made a lot of new friends. I got to be in a completely non-toxic environment for a whole week and it was amazing.

Someone drew a picture of Delia and put it on the bulletin board. I may have cried a little.

iOSCon 2017

iOSCon was a different experience. It was not as large as GDC, but it was in London. This was my first overseas conference. I had concerns about the flight over and getting around. I also could not take Delia with me. I was afraid that I would not fulfill all the correct paper work and she would be taken away at the border or I would be denied entry into the country.

I also did not have any cellular service. I am not comfortable with public transportation because I live in rural Wisconsin. I was terrified of getting lost and not being able to get to and from my hotel. I have wanted to visit England forever, but I was terrified of trying to actually visit anything.

One of my friends, Paul Hudson, was going to speak at the conference and lives in Bath. He invited me to take the train out there and visit the sites. I was terrified of getting lost on the train. I had no idea how to get anywhere. Paul sent me incredibly detailed directions about where to buy a train ticket and how to get there. His directions helped me figure out how to get around Paddington Station when I arrived off the plane and was suffering from jet lag. I would have freaked out more than I actually did had I not been forewarned about navigating around.

When I got to Bath, he showed me around. I didn’t have to worry about referencing a map or getting lost. Getting to visit Bath was the highlight of my trip. If he had not reached out and taken the time to make me feel comfortable about going out there I never would have gone. I would have spent even more of my time in London hiding in my hotel room watching Law & Order reruns that miraculously still play on British TV.

I fulfill my life’s purpose by visiting one of the world’s oldest baths in Bath.

Helping Hand

I have trouble doing things that don’t bother most people. One thing that frustrates me when I go to San Francisco is that people invite me to go out to dinner and don’t do anything to help me get there. Sometimes they don’t even tell me the name of the restaurant they’re eating at. I wind up staying in Cupertino a lot, and the idea of hopping on the CalTrain and trying to figure out the MUNI and the BART to get to a location that no one will even tell me about throws me into a shut down.

I don’t like that I can’t do the same things everyone else can. I feel embarrassed having to explain that I curl up in a ball crying if I encounter multiple public transportation systems in one place when I don’t expect to. Everyone else knows what they’re doing and they get aggressive when you’re in their way because you’re freaked out and don’t know what is going on.

If people want me to do things with them they need to do a little more to help me get there. I need explicit directions. I need addresses. Having the name of the place is helpful too. It’s not that I am incompetent or lazy. I just need more help.

I don’t expect people to make the extra effort to help me spend time with them. Whenever someone does, it always means a lot to me. I know our community values being able to go off on your own and do things without help, but social stuff is really hard. It’s hard to go to a place you have never been and to deal with a system you don’t understand. Having a modicum of empathy for someone else and reaching out to do slightly more for them when they have trouble doing it for themselves is always unexpected and greatly appreciated.

There are so many small things that people can do that take just a few minutes out of their day that can mean the world to someone who has trouble doing things for themselves. My experiences this year are making me more aware of what I can do to be a positive influence on the world around me. With so much negativity out in the world right now, small acts of kindness really mean a lot. We’re all in this together.

Thoughts on Being Single for the Second Time

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About two years ago I went through a divorce. I had known my marriage was over years before I was able to finally pull the trigger on it. I had actually tried leaving once a year earlier, but I was forced to go back to my husband because I wasn’t able to sustain myself quite yet and he promised to change. He didn’t and we followed through on the second attempt.

My ex-husband had an OKCupid account set up months before we filed for divorce the second time. He had his first date less than a week after he moved out of our house. A year after he moved out he had already replaced me with another woman with long red hair, two small dogs, and mental health issues.

During the year or two after our divorce I was a complete wreck. I was in much worse shape than I thought I would be. I had wanted the divorce. Our marriage was over. I thought I would feel free to finally do all the things I wanted to do. Instead, I felt like a death had happened. I had never been responsible for balancing my own budget and I had no idea how much money I earned or how much my bills were.

I had multiple rooms in my house that I simply never went into. My house felt incomprehensibly large even though it’s actually quite small. I used to have dreams that I was walking through my house and it was a giant labyrinth of gardens and piano rooms that I never knew were there because I only stayed in one small corner of my house.

The idea of trying to date anyone during this time seemed absolutely incomprehensible. I consistently see men who have recently gotten out of relationships try to get back on the horse and date again immediately. I don’t understand how they can do that.

I haven’t been on a date since I was 16 years old. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was put on medication that made me gain sixty pounds in less than two years. My medication triggered panic attacks and caused a lot of mental health issues alongside the ones they were supposed to actually treat. I was a chubby, socially awkward woman with no social skills trying to navigate a social environment run on alcohol, which I couldn’t drink because of my medications.

I felt like having a boyfriend would give me some kind of validation that I was actually a person worthy of being liked. I used to develop crushes on other socially awkward guys who were less attractive than I was because I thought that they were low enough that I could get them. Most of them were either too socially awkward to return my advances or were appalled that a chubby socially awkward girl thought she was good enough for them while they drooled over anorexic teenagers with daddy issues.

Boys in college had been sold on the idea of the hook up. They had been told all through high school that when they got to college it would be a never ending stream of pussy. None of them wanted a relationship. They wanted to have sex with you and never speak to you again. I literally had guys come up to me and say to my face, “I hate you. I know you hate me. We should have sex. It will be fun.“

I was too priggish to give into any of these situations, but other girls I know did. They slept with guys to give themselves a sense of personal validation and were always disappointed when things never went any further.

I left college without having a boyfriend. I also left college without having any kind of stable career path. I was faced with a future alone with no meaning. Then I met my husband. We’d known one another since we were children. We were both tired of trying to find someone. I needed health insurance and to move out of my parent’s house. I thought I knew everything about him. I was terribly wrong and if you ever meet me IRL ask me about it and I’ll give more details than I am willing to give here!

After my misadventures in college, this seemed like as good as it was going to get. Sure, we weren’t really attracted to one another, but he would look me in the eye and talk to me. That was an improvement.

Things were fine for the first two years. Then he got weird. He started spending money we didn’t have on shit we didn’t need. I decided to go back to school for computer programming. I wanted an actual career and not just the menial white collar jobs I had held since we got married. I wanted a sense of self worth and to do interesting work I was proud of. I told him that if he would support me for two years that I could start bringing in four time more money than I had before. We could start a business. We could be partners. We could have our freedom and independence from The Man.

He wanted his freedom, but he didn’t want to work for it. It was the biggest disappointment in his life that he wasn’t born wealthy. This ate at his soul. He was bitter and resentful of having to go to work to earn a wage. He was always scheming about how to get rich quick without any effort. He would bully me about how I wasn’t developing the next Candy Crush. He would come to me in tears and tell me that he just needed me to earn a million dollars a year. He could find a way to be happy on just a million dollars a year.

He got incredibly paranoid. He was convinced I was cheating on him. He would follow me to networking events he previously had no interest in. He would skulk around behind me nursing a glass of scotch, watching me as I tried to network. He would go over and yell at me in front of people I was trying to connect with professionally. Once I came home from a business meeting to find him in the garage activating the GPS on my phone so he could track me down and physically bring me home. He would lay on the ground behind my car to prevent me from leaving the house.

He was jeopardizing everything I had worked so hard to accomplish and I simply could not tolerate his behavior anymore.

I feel I have been left in the lurch. I talk to other people who have built their careers on writing books and doing conference talks. I ask them for advice about how I can build this as a sustainable career while still paying my bills and I always get sheepish looks and the response, “Well, my wife has a really good job with benefits.“ I hear that and my heart sinks. I keep seeing and hearing that the career path I want to take can only be sustained by having a supportive partner who is willing to shore up the other person’s financial deficits.

I feel a great deal of anger at my ex-husband for destroying our marriage because he was unwilling to give up his $10,000 a year vacation habit. I have been borderline unemployed since September and I am just now reaching the end of my savings. We were $30,000 in debt with two incomes and bringing in over six figures while we were married because my ex couldn’t do without picking up an expensive hobby every couple of months. I had a plan that would have been mutually beneficial for both of us and now I am spinning plates frantically hoping that I can achieve what seems like the impossible all by myself.

I have no illusions about my book. I am writing about an incredibly niche topic that has almost no job prospects. I keep hoping if I develop skills around graphics programming that I can break into that area of expertise and have a long, stable career build on something most people don’t know that doesn’t fundamentally change, but I don’t know if I have enough time or runway to slog it out. I’m afraid of taking a dead end job and waking up seven years from now to find I didn’t keep up with the new changes in tech and that I am unemployable. Having the buffer of another person in case I made a terrible mistake and failed eased my mind. Having no safety net and throwing myself into a chasm right now is deeply worrying to me and I don’t have anyone I can even talk to about my anxiety because I am completely alone right now. Except for my parents. They have been fantastic, but I hate having to go to them with my hand out.

Being single at this point in my life is markedly different than it was when I was younger and I had no career. I am doing my best to not see getting remarried as an escape route for the path I have chosen to take. I would love to have a supportive partner around to help me out so I don’t have to do this alone, but having survived an unsupportive one, I know it’s better to be alone than live through that again.

I keep feeling like I am supposed to move on. Join OKCupid or Match.com. Go to speed dating. Relocate to San Francisco or Seattle to get access to a larger pool of eligible men. But I keep getting this nagging feeling that things have not fundamentally changed much since I was in college. Reading horror stories about how Tinder has basically supercharged the college hook up dynamic worries me. Seeing how many men are basically jumping into relationships to avoid being alone worries me too.

I like working. I see so many people doing frivolous crap all the time that I worry if I did move to a city and started trying to be social like everyone else that I would stop dedicating myself to my work. I would stop pushing and get left behind. It’s so hard to find another person who also likes working who is willing to just be in the same space I am while we’re both working.

I want to be with someone who wants to be with me. I would love to have someone to cook for besides just myself. I would like to have someone to build robots with me in my basement and then cuddle on the couch watching Star Trek. I don’t want that badly enough to grasp onto anything with a dick that comes along because I don’t want to be alone. I feel I have progressed from my college aged self who felt like having a boyfriend would be a validation to someone who is comfortable with themselves but would like to find another person to share things with.

I’m not willing to be with someone who did a visual assessment of me that I am just hot enough that they’re willing to have sex with me but they think I am unattractive enough to be approachable. I don’t want to be with someone who thinks that relationships are parking spaces and that you are supposed to always be parked somewhere or on the lookout for one.

As it looks increasingly like this will never happen, I am trying to accept being alone. I won’t settle for anything less than someone who likes me as a person and who I actively want to be with. There might be no one out there like that and I need to be okay with that.

Being alone sucks. But being with a destructive and unsupportive partner who doesn’t love you sucks more. It’s important to have a creative and fulfilling life rather than waiting for it to just happen to you. For better or worse, I am living a life I want to lead. I have no idea how sustainable it is in the long run, but for now I’m being true to myself. I am trying to have faith that if I do that then things will work out. Doesn’t mean I don’t indulge in feeling sorry for myself every once and a while.

Enough whinging. Back to work.

Quality over Quantity

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Back in December I was approached about contributing to the Pragmatic Magazine. I was told the theme of the issue was Swift and I was asked if I had any good Swift posts that I would be willing to share.

I had a number of Swift posts that I was very proud of and I sent the links to the editor. Then I had a sinking realization that these posts were all from 2015.

Last year was a difficult year. I made a lot of mistakes and had a number of mental health issues. On paper my year seemed like it was incredibly successful, but I felt at the end of 2016 that I had not grown as I would have liked and I was not in a place I wanted to be.

One of my resolutions toward the end of last year was to have more technical content on my blog. I am in the process of writing a book. I intended to have companion blog posts where I share a number of things that I learned while I was writing the book. I have one post that has been partially written since November. It’s nowhere close to being done.

I keep wondering what’s the matter with me. I would like to produce more technical content. I keep meaning to, but things keep coming up. I know if I don’t make time to produce technical materials for blog posts or conference talks or to post on GitHub that I will be left behind. People always want examples of your work and you can’t keep pointing to work you did three years ago.

This morning I found a link to this article. The author talks about a lot of strategies about how to have a long and successful career in tech. This article helped to crystalize in my mind about why I am not producing more technical content.

Those blog posts that I submitted to the magazine were based on problems that took me months to solve. Each one of those posts and every project that I have written about that I am proud of all started the same way. I took something that was hopelessly unfamiliar and tried to force myself to learn it. These were all projects I did for Brad Larson when we were rewriting our code base in Swift.

One of these projects was wrapping libxml2 in Swift. The sample code was all written in Pascal. There was only one post written by anyone for this topic for the iPhone. That person was Jeff LaMarche. I was going to link to his blog post about it in this blog post, but it’s been taken down. So I had an incredibly undocumented technology that no one was using that it was my job to figure out.

I had about a week of complete and total panic and despair. I felt that I had been hired by mistake and that Brad would find out I was an inexperienced idiot and I would be fired in disgrace and I would never work again. I wondered about how hard it would be to find a nice easy call center job where I could cross stitch while talking on the phone all day answering the same questions over and over again. I thought this was hopeless, but it was my job to figure it out, so I had to try.

I spent a lot of time walking. I couldn’t look at my computer without getting a complete headache. I spent some time building robots. I would look at the docs periodically, but not for too long because doing so would cause a migraine.

After several weeks of doing this, suddenly things started to become clear. Instead of looking at a bunch of gibberish and having no idea about how to approach it, I finally had questions. I wondered what this one thing did. I wondered what the difference was between one object and another. I started to understand how to approach the problem.

I completed my task by learning all of this stuff over the course of about two months and I wrote my post. I was incredibly proud of the work that I did on that project and for finally figuring out how to solve it.

I never would have done that project if I wasn’t working for Brad.

First off, I never would have known what libxml2 even was. I would have just used the built in Cocoa framework and fought with it, but found plenty of sample code that I could copy and paste and go about my merry way. More importantly, if I had been doing this for myself, I would have taken one look at the lack of support, said fuck this, and done something else.

Forcing myself to confront something that seemed impossible and pushed me close to my breaking point mentally and emotionally. I have a faulty, tin-plated emotional system. If I get pushed too far I can’t function or learn. My brain shuts down. I had to confront my panic and my fear and force myself to approach this logically. At the beginning of Dune the main character has to take a Human Test. He is forced to put his hand in a box of pain and not remove it. Having mental health issues is like taking a Human Test. You have to think your way through your emotional issues and find some way of logically dealing with them so you don’t remove your hand and get scratched by the Gom Jabbar.

By being placed in a position where I could not simply give up, I was able to push through the initial phase of not knowing what the fuck I was doing to be able to see that there was an end to the Desert of Despair. I understand now that a lot of things I want to learn that seem difficult or impossible are not. I have been trying to teach myself Metal and 3D graphics math for the last two years. I know that even though the symbols seem incomprehensible and there are not a lot of approachable resources out there, I can bash my head against it enough to figure out a starting point. I can look at those symbols long enough over a long enough period of time that I can grasp some kernel of what I don’t understand that I can figure out.

I feel like our community doesn’t reward people for solving hard problems.

It pisses me off every year when Tim Cook announces some amazing new thing at WWDC and some jack ass in the audience gets some version of “Hello World!” working on it because everyone wants to be first. Everyone tries to cherry pick some easy problem that they can solve and post about so that they can show they’re keeping up with the Lattners. I have seen so much pressure in this community to pretend like you know everything. Companies place a lot of emphasis on what do you “know” not “how do you learn.” I admit that it’s a lot easier to test knowledge as opposed to problem solving and learning. I know that we’ve generally used knowledge of data structures and sorting algorithms as a proxy for how we learn. But memorizing some tips and rules doesn’t prepare you for the complete and total helplessness you feel when you confront something you must figure out that you don’t know how to do. You either rise to the occasion or you flee and become a Scrum Master.

I am realizing that most of the things I find interesting are difficult. I am in the process of learning some things that are complicated and poorly explained. I am hoping that after I push through everything I will have a wealth of material to write about on this blog. But I have to accept that what I want to do is hard. There is going to be a lot of invisible work that I do that isn’t being seen. There will be a lot of time spent thinking and processing and waiting for things to click.

Dan Barber is a prominent farm-to-table chef focused on sustainable food production. He wrote an article a while ago that really stuck with me. The gist of his article is that farmers are stripping their soil by only growing the most high profit crops. The soil gets progressively poorer and the food grown on it grows more and more tasteless because it’s nutritionally vacant. He found a farmer who grew an heirloom variety of wheat for bread flour. He thought the reason the flour was so delicious was because it was some heirloom variety, but it was because the farmer rotated his crops. He grew some less lucrative crops on his land that enriched the soil and only grew this wheat on the soil every three years.

I think one reason we have such a high burnout rate in tech is that we’re approaching development like we do farming. We will keep stripping our mental soil because it’s more lucrative to do so than it is to have furlough periods where we push ourselves to achieve truly difficult things. Start ups want to churn and burn developers because they don’t care about a person’s long term viability as an asset. It’s our responsibility as developers to take control of our careers.

Right now I am taking some time off to write a book. Even if the book is wildly successful I won’t make nearly as much money off of it as I would if I had worked somewhere during that amount of time. But taking this time to learn these things that I have wanted to learn for so long has been an extraordinary experience. The process of taking something that seems impossible and being able to make some traction with it makes me feel like I can conquer the world and anything is possible. Compared to a year ago, where I felt like I had to pretend I knew everything and I worked myself into a nervous breakdown.

Last year was a furlough year. I needed it to recover from some bad professional decisions. This year is a soil enriching year. I have so many projects I want to do and write about, but they’re going to take some time to figure out.

I would like to write more about tech on this blog, but I have to accept that I want to learn some difficult things that take a lot of time to figure out. I am not going to have a new post here every week that I am proud of. But if I can get four difficult technical posts on here this year, that’s not so bad.

Rules for Engagement on Twitter

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Hi.

Today I blocked several people for the first time ever on Twitter. These are people I have known for a long period of time and one of whom I have met in person and know to not be a sociopath. Here is why.

I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When I was in college a stranger held me hostage in my dorm room and raped and tortured me for two and a half hours. For those of you fortunate enough to not have PTSD, one of the delightful aspects of having it is dealing with flashbacks. Flashbacks happen when you are in a situation that is reminiscent in some way of the circumstances that caused your trauma. It’s your brain’s way of protecting you. It senses that you are in a similar situation to one where bad things happened to you, so it tries to force you to flee from that situation to protect yourself.

I recently certified Delia as an Emotional Support Animal because one thing that triggers flashbacks is being trapped in an enclosed metal tube with a bunch of men I don’t know. I can fly without her, but the efforts it takes for me to calm myself down for several hours drains every ounce of energy I have. I get to my destination exhausted and it can take me up to a month to recover.

Another thing that triggers flashbacks is dealing with aggressive males who do not listen to me and continue to engage me when I want to be left alone.

There have been multiple times this year on Twitter where I have made a comment or asked a question and have been bombarded with well meaning but obnoxious advice from men. It ranges from speaking to me like I am a toddler and couldn’t possibly have considered the most obvious solution that they are giving me or trying to force me to use their preferred mode of whatever in spite of my pleas saying that I already considered it and it won’t work for reasons I don’t want to articulate in 20 tweets.

When this happens, I start to feel overwhelmed. I feel personally attacked and unsafe. It causes me tremendous amounts of emotional distress. I start to have flashbacks and experience all the emotions I experienced when I was being raped. I have had at least a half dozen times this past year where I have gotten so distressed from these interactions that I have had to make emergency appointments with my therapist and spend money I don’t have trying to recover to the point that I am able to work. I have been in constant fear of not being able to work and earn money and destroying my career this year because these well meaning but clueless men have insisted upon trying to be “helpful.”

I have tried multiple times over the last year to explain to people that what they are doing is causing me real harm and damage. Every time I have attempted to engage in a dialog in explaining where I am coming from, I get a bunch of defensiveness and people telling me that they’re engineers. They want to solve the problem. They’re not intending to cause me psychological damage and therefore I don’t have the right to be upset by their behavior.

I don’t give a shit what you intend. It’s the result of your actions that matters.

If you are driving around and you get distracted by your phone and run someone over who is paralyzed for life, it doesn’t matter that you didn’t intend to run them over. They’re still damaged. You don’t get to hide behind your intensions when what you are doing is causing me actual harm.

I am tired of being responsible for having to do the emotional legwork that men are unwilling to do. I have told them many times how to avoid causing me harm and I am being told it’s my problem and they won’t change because their desire to avoid hearing that they’re doing something harmful is greater than my need to be able to earn a living.

I don’t want to be a massive bitch and make people feel like they can’t talk to me without getting bitched out, so I am establishing my rules so that I can protect myself psychologically while still being able to engage with people on Twitter:

First Strike: I Ask You to Back Off

I understand that on Twitter things can escalate very quickly and tempers can flare. At this point something will have happened and I will start to feel overwhelmed but I can still avoid a total shutdown, but only if you stop engaging with me.

I will tell you that I am feeling overwhelmed and ask you to back off.

At this point, if you back off, we’re good. You can feel good about being an engineer and know that you have made a situation better. If you still want to make this point to me later, please wait a day. Ask me for my email and send me an email or give me a chance to engage in a better forum of communication.

Second Strike: I Send You a Link to this Blog Post

It’s possible you’re reading this because I sent you a link to this blog post. I am trying to explain to you why I can’t continue to engage with you. I am not trying to blame you or tell you that you’re an asshole. I am assuming that you mean well and I am trying to find some way to let you know that was you are doing is causing me harm with the hope that you will respect my need to be left alone. Again, if you read this post and you back off and leave me alone, no harm, no foul.

Third Strike: I Will Block You

If you have gotten to this point and you are still continuing to engage with me, then I will block you. I am doing this out of emotional self defense. You have shown that you are not willing to respect my need to feel safe. You are leaving me no other option than to block you to protect myself.

If you’re someone that I know personally and have invested in a relationship with, I will try to remember to unblock you later. I will emphatically ask you to please stop doing things that cause me psychological trauma.

I do not want to block people, but I also do not want to spend a hundred dollars seeing a therapist to be able to keep working. My need to be able to work supersedes your desire to feel helpful. If you want to be helpful, please back off if I tell you that you are forcing me to shut down. If you respect that, we’re cool.

Thank you.

Emotional Support Animals

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I recently registered my pug Delia as a service animal. This blog post is about why I did this and what steps are necessary for someone considering doing this as well.

Why I Registered Delia

Since I stopped self medicating with alcohol, my emotional health has become quite fragile. A lot of things I was numbing with alcohol are no longer numb and it’s become increasingly difficult for me to function without my animals.

img_5178I made the decision to register her when I went on a business trip and had a complete shut down. I knew I was not feeling well before I left on the trip. Things got progressively worse as the trip went on. I did not want to disclose my disability because I did not want to have to deal with attempting to explain what was going on because I thought it would affect my ability to retain this contract.

I made it to the last day of my trip, but then I could not put it off any longer and I shut down.

I realized as I was having my shut down that I would not be able to hide what was going on. I realized that I would have been able to avoid this situation if I had my dog with me to pull me out of it before things degraded to that point.

Shut downs are unpleasant. When I have one, I lose my ability to move. I stop being able to think clearly and I talk more than I should about things. I start to feel intense feelings of shame and hopelessness. I feel worthless and feel like the world would be better off without me because I can’t do anything right.

It takes a long time for me to recover from these. The aftershocks of this shut down affected me for a month. No matter how difficult it is to explain the need for the support animal, it would be better to explain it up front rather than trying to hide it and deal with the aftermath.

I understand that this means that there are places who will not want to work with me because they don’t want to deal with “broken” people. I am writing this off as places I don’t want to work anyway because they are going to break me if I work for them anyway. I know this severely limits the number of places I can work, but I am hoping to figure out a way to continue to have independence on terms that make it possible.

How to Register a Support Animal

I went to the National Service Animal Registry to find out if it was possible to register Delia as a service animal.

There are three tiers of support animals:

Service animals require the most training. They also have the most “rights.” People who require a service animal are people with physical disabilities who require the animal to supplement their own physical abilities. They need the animal to help them see, to take care of them if they have a seizure, and do a lot of heavy lifting.

Therapy animals have really limited “rights.” They’re primarily meant for things like nursing homes and hospice care. They can’t really be taken anywhere else beyond that.

I registered Delia as the third option, an ESA. I don’t need her to be able to take care of me if I have a seizure because I don’t have seizures. I have panic attacks and PTSD flashbacks when I am in crowded areas like airplanes. I just need her to keep me calm so that dealing with these situations is less emotionally draining for me.

In order to have an animal qualify as an ESA, you must have them registered with the registry and you must have a note from your doctor that is dated that says they are treating you for an illness in the DSM-IV and you are currently under their care and that the animal is part of your therapy.

ESAs do not have unlimited rights. They are not allowed to be banned from airplanes or from hotels/housing. If I were to go crazy and decide to relocate to San Francisco, theoretically a landlord can’t force me to pay a pet fee to have her there or to decide not to rent to me because I have a “pet”.

Not a “Pet”

img_5171When I took Delia to Indie DevStock, a conference attendee posted a picture of us on Twitter and said that the conference was pet friendly.

Delia is more than a pet.

I require Delia to be able to function. I didn’t bring her along because I couldn’t find someone to watch her or was too cheap to place her in a kennel.

If I don’t have her I have panic attacks. I have complete shut-downs. I have issues that can be ameliorated by having her there for support.

Yes, You May Pet Her

I know that many people with working service dogs do not want them to be petted because they are working. That is not the case with Delia.

Delia is there to provide comfort and support. I am happy when she is able to do that with more people than just me. If you want to pet her and petting her makes you happy, then she is doing her job.

Requirements

The biggest requirement for a support animal is that they have to have a calm disposition. They can’t be aggressive toward other animals or children.

Since Delia basically spends all day asleep, she works as a support animal.

They have to be trained to be on a leash. They have to be potty trained. You are still responsible for their poop and so forth. This was a pain on the last day of my trip when Delia had to go outside three times between midnight and 3:00 am.

It took a bit more planning to make sure I brought enough food for her. I also had to bring puppy pads and bowls for water. There was a lot of stuff I had to make sure I did not forget when I brought her on a trip.

Why I am Doing This

I am not doing this because I think I am somehow special and should be able to take my dog with me places. I am doing this for a few reasons.

The first reason is that I care about my mental health. I know we as a community do not like to say we can’t do things. We push ourselves to work eighty hour weeks to show we’re passionate and we don’t like to be the first person to leave the office. We put pressure on ourselves and the people around us to live up to some imaginary ideal that does not benefit anyone but the people who pay us for forty hours of work when we give them eighty.

The other reason is that I want there to be more awareness of invisible disabilities in our community.

We talk a lot about wanting diversity. That usually involves getting more white women to speak at our conferences. There are lots of kinds of diversity. I would personally like to see more people of color at our conferences. I would also like to see more people with disabilities.

There is a lot of pressure to hide a disability. Human Resource people are constantly afraid you’re going to sue them for whatever reason, so they don’t want you there even though all you want is to earn a living and be treated like a human being worthy of respect.

The company I had my contract at told me that they had never seen a service animal at the company. This tells me that people who are disabled enough to need a service animal either don’t apply to these places because they know they won’t be hired, or they give up trying to make it somewhere like that because they run into too many road blocks along the way.

I think our community should help one another out to try and make sure more people make it to the top of this profession. Instead of trying to force people out for not being able to work 60+ hours a week, we should find solutions that allow people who are differently abled to have a career and support themselves.

I could hide my dog and my mental health problems and pretend to be normal, but that helps no one. I think we as a community need to focus on keeping everyone mentally healthy so we can have more people who have 15 years of experience who are still programming and helping the newbies learn new stuff rather than burning them out and forcing them into management or some other less stressful line of work.

Programming is a marathon and not a sprint. We should be trying to make sure as many people get to the finish line as possible rather than trying to knock out as many as we can so that we can get a better score at the end.
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Depression and Engagement

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One of the major issues I have dealt with so far in my short career is lack of engagement on many of my projects. My managers, for whatever reason, are not around to see what I am doing. They are on business trips. They are swamped with entirely too many other responsibilities. The product owner is ambivalent about what they want to do so we’re waiting around for them to make a decision about something. Not poking at anyone in particular, this has been an issue I have seen a lot of places.

As programmers we’re supposed to be self motivated. We’re supposed to be given a problem and we’re supposed to run with it and get it done. We complain about micromanaging and how it’s hampering our ability to get anything done.

When you get left alone on a project, initially it can feel freeing. You can work without being disturbed. But then at a certain point you realize that you have been given no guidance on what is wanted. It’s like creating an app with no auto layout. You kind of know that there are some components that someone wants, but you don’t know how they want them arranged.

This is the point where things start to affect my mental health.

I start to encounter mental friction where I can’t make any decisions because I don’t know what people want. I know that there is one way they want something but they’re not around to tell me what that is or they don’t know to begin with.

This triggers feelings of depression and despair. I start to feel that success is impossible. I try for a while to do my best, but at a certain point I shut down. I am overwhelmed by choice because I don’t know which one is right. I can’t function. Nothing I do is going to result in success, so why bother?

I feel tremendous amounts of failure and self loathing. I think that I can’t hack it. I should give up on programming. I should go back to working at a call center where there is a script and no decisions to be made. There is no pressure from coworkers trying to sabotage you or pretending like they know more than you do because no one gives a shit and they’re just there to collect a paycheck. You don’t have to pretend like you care about anything other than not getting fired. It’s soothing and restful.

I have had this happen often enough that I can see it coming. I try to engage but so far that has never been successful.

What I need to pull me out of this state is to have something I can solve or get engaged in. I have noticed I will be on the verge of a complete shut down when something will catch my attention. A small light will appear in the darkness and my deprived attention will fixate on trying to solve it. Then my brain comes alive again and I wake up and everything is okay again if only for a little while.

I want to talk about mental self defense here.

I have learned to find things I can do that will pull me out of this state. Usually it’s working on a tutorial. It’s a set of directions with an end goal. You feel like you’re getting something done. It will engage my tired and exhausted brain and lead it like a trail of breadcrumbs back home. It’s not open ended so I don’t get overwhelmed trying to get something working from scratch. I know other people can do that and I can too sometimes, but not when I am engulfed in mental darkness.

Managers don’t want you doing stuff like this. I have tried to talk to them about what I can do to pull me out of this state. I can’t work on the current project. It is causing me to shut down. Is there anything else I can work on so I can mentally recover?

They will purse their lips and say they really need me to keep working on the current project. It doesn’t matter that I am unable to make any real progress on it or that anything I write is going to be buggy as fuck, they want the illusion that I am working on their project.

If you’re working with a manager who isn’t giving you enough constraints to figure out what a successful end condition is, don’t mentally collapse. Try to recognize when you’re starting to shut down. Find things that can pull you out of it.

I know it’s hard to do. You feel yourself getting further and further behind. You’re in a mental terror that you’re going to be fired for not finishing your project. You need to calm down. You need to prevent yourself from going under at all costs. If you break yourself your project is not going to get done. You’re no good to anyone if you can’t function.

If you do break, it will take a while to recover. I see a Reiki therapist who helps me recover from my breaks, but she always tells me to take it easy after she helps me.

I have gotten better at going back to my “analog” hobbies to get away from a computer screen when I feel myself going under. Cooking and doing cross stitch are tactile and engaging and give me a project that I can see progress on so that I don’t go completely insane. It can feel like doing projects is a dodge or a waste of time, but it’s vital time that I need to help my brain recover so I can keep working.

I never think that I am going to feel better. I think that there is no point in trying to do a tutorial because I should just give up and accept that I am a failure. Sometimes I am too broken to work on it, but when I have had a chance to rest, I come back and I feel my brain slowly wake back up and I feel better.

The biggest reason I wrote this is to try and give hope to anyone who feels consumed by mental darkness. I have felt that a lot over the last few years. When you’re in the middle of it you feel there is no hope. You feel you can never do anything great ever again. You feel broken, like everything has been stripped from you and it can be hard to try and engage in something because you’re convinced you will fail.

Please know there is hope. Rest mentally and take baby steps. If you can’t engage in anything, then you’re burned out. Sleep, rest, hike, whatever. Then come back and pick up something structured and engaging.

Engagement is so important to what we do. We mentally need to feel a sense of accomplishment. We need to have tasks that we can complete and see progress in the work we are doing. Creating those meaningful milestones and discrete tasks takes time and mental energy, but it’s necessary to maintain mental health and stability.

A developer career is a marathon and not a sprint. If you injure yourself you need to rest and work your way back up to training again. You don’t want to force yourself over the finish line and wind up in a wheel chair.

Know that you’re not alone. There is a way out of the darkness. It’s not just you.

Hey, Just Wanted to Let You Know You’re Garage is on Fire. You Should Do Something About It.

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I came back from a business trip a little under two weeks ago. The trip was incredibly difficult and draining for me. I missed my pugs. I missed my own bed. I wanted nothing more than to come home and have some awesome pug snuggles.

I got home and discovered my basement had leaked at some point while I was gone. There is a pool of standing water in one quadrant of the basement. I do not know where it originated. I believe, based on my forensic CSI skills that it came through a window in the corner of the basement, but I don’t know for sure.

My ex-husband helpfully boxed up most of my books in cardboard boxes that were helpfully soaking up a bunch of nasty contaminated water that was sitting in the basement.

I could not deal with it. I am still trying to deal with it.

I speak on here a bit about having depression. Having depression usually means that I either can’t deal with anything or I can deal with one thing at a time. I work from home. I need to keep my job. For the last few weeks, the only thing I have really been able to deal with is doing the things necessary to keep my job.

My basement is unfinished, so I believe if I throw away all of the wet and damp books and cardboard in the basement that there will be no long term damage to the house.

I am aware of the fact that this is a health hazard. I filled my garage can last week and didn’t have room for all of the rest of the stuff that is contaminating my basement. I know there was probably someone or something I could do to get that taken care of without me having to do it myself, but I can’t deal with that right now because all I can deal with is keeping my job.

I went on Twitter to commiserate about how sucky it was to come home to find a problem I had to deal with and I got a lot of finger wagging from people who seem to be under the impression that I am an idiot.

“You know that’s a health hazard, right?”

“Why don’t you have a sump pump?”

“Why do you live in a house? You should relocate to San Fransisco.”

People telling me these things makes me feel like a helpful neighbor telling me my garage is on fire and I should really do something about it while I am also trying to deal with my house being on fire. I am not stupid. I am fully aware of the fact that this is a problem. I know that I need to get that water out of my basement and throw away all the ruined things down there. I just can’t deal with it right now.