The Breach of Sanity; The Edge of Optimism

In so many paths of life, nearly everything we deal with is a complete and utter facade.

Humans regularly lie to one another constantly; sometimes, without rhyme or reason. Most of the time, just to protect our own sanity. This entry opens up on that because I want to really push hard on revoking the practice of lying about being okay. Not just for me. I think there's a lot of people who still need to learn that it's okay, to not be okay.

The muddled catalogue of my experiences this year have seen me hit peaks and lows, frequently, with complete pivots at the blink of an eye.

And, for the most part, I want to talk about them.

The Personal Problem

Personal affects everything. No matter how much you fight it, you have or will, at some point or another, face something in your personal life that affects everything else.

We're all human, unfortunately, and we all have our own coping mechanisms. We need them or you'll break.

Personally (see?), my coping mechanism is humour. It's emotional incompetence trying to fix a problem by being funny, which clearly isn't a great response to have. Emotions are incredibly hard to balance for me for a plethora of reasons that deserve their own entry. So I do what I know best: I try to make people laugh. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

But what happens when there's no one around?

Oh, boy. That's the real abyss. When your own mind is trying to eat you alive, when the outlets are gone, and when the silence turns into something else entirely, it's fucking brutal.

That's one of the very reasons I wanted to make a real effort at another online journal again and lean into the dark side of everything. I'm an exhausted realist and I wanted Starless to reflect that. My last attempt at a journal led me into the trap of optimism and trying to write for other people.

Starless isn't for anyone else. It's for me. It's my safe-space to write what I really need to write about. No mask, no bullshit, no facade. Just reality, no matter how grim or daunting it is.

The realisation of all of this has hit me hard this year because a lot has happened. I've climbed back up and taken blow after blow. And I'm exhausted.

Personal issues have absolutely affected my work performance this year. This isn't an issue for me because I work with people that have the same beliefs that I do: admitting you're not doing okay and stepping away to breathe is a clear and required necessity.

I've worked in places where a mask was required, daily, and I know people who have and still work in those kinds of environments. I stopped dealing with it a long time ago because it isn't healthy. And my recommendation to anyone who has the same issues? Leave. Find something better. Where you know the people you deal with, daily, give a fuck about you. Otherwise, you're going to stop giving a fuck. And that's very, very dangerous territory.

The most important thing is you. No one is allowed to convince you otherwise. If being you is suddenly almost unbearable, then you need to take some time to fix it.

Pars familiae

I have three black cats. All rescues. I've had cats all my life but these three really just feel like they're mine.

Diesel, Cake, and Lunar.

Granted, they're not the names you'd expect for void creatures, only Lunar wasn't named when we rescued him. They're incredibly important to me, names aside.

Earlier this year, I was on the phone when Lunar came into the room and jumped onto the bed. It took a few seconds for me to notice that he'd left some blood behind. A lot of blood. And I started panicking internally.

I tried to get a good look at him, but he'd run off into another room. I took a quick opportunity to go see if I could find out what happened, which led me into follow a blood trail onto the landing, down the stairs, through the hallway, into the kitchen, and to the backdoor.

That's when I stopped. I had to go get some help with getting him into a carrier so he could go to the emergency vet. On a fucking Sunday.

When he was finally en-route, I spent nearly two hours cleaning up the obscene amount of blood he'd left in most of the rooms, throughout the house. It was devastating. I was nauseous, terrified, and I'd mentally shut down, operating on autopilot.

When he finally came home, I'd readied the spare room for him to stay in during recovery. He had staples in his leg and a cone on (which took three separate attempts to keep on).

Three days later, someone left a window open and he'd gotten out. Cone on, stapled in his leg, running freely in the fields behind the house. I was fucking mortified. Terrified. I had no idea if he'd come back.

I'd found out he escaped at 11:30am on a Wednesday morning, just before I had to join a meeting, which I went through in absolute disbelief. When I went to verify he'd gone myself, no one else was here. The house was empty. I posted a message about going to check and that was it. Before I even knew it, I was mentally devoid for the day. Utterly broken.

I don't actually know how long I spent staring out at the fields, shouting him, because I'd switched off. It is a genuine blur to me. The entire period of time still seems like a surreal nightmare.

He came back at 8pm that evening. Nearly 8 hours later, he wandered in. I took him up to the room, checked that the window was locked for the sixth time, and then just sat with him. Fed him. Looked at him.

I was relieved but still, barely holding on. He came back — but how long until the next blow?

Fortunately, Lunar is now fine. He's a year old and, while he spends a lot of time outside, that's shortening more and more the closer we get to winter, and he's regularly lounging around, recovery in the past.

Work was a second priority for me that week. I wasn't doing okay and I think everyone knew it, even if I wasn't explicitly saying it. I'm grateful for that, though it's not a period of time that I'd wish on anyone.

Self-destructive tendencies

Confidence has never been my forte. Especially in situations I'm extremely unfamiliar with, I'll avoid the centre of everything and hover around the edge.

That being said, when I do build my confidence around something, I'm far more open and happy to voice findings, opinions, and concerns.

This is a horrific trait. My own perfectionism hinders me from being typical and learning in an open and disclosed way, purely because I dislike not knowing something or not being able to do something. It's the fear of looking idiotic, amplified by ten, for a multitude of reasons.

This is one of the parts of my brain that I've been trying to rewire over the past few years, with some success.

The ability to say "I don't know" as a programmer is significant to me. It's okay to not know something. I find more value in someone admitting they don't know how to do something and want to learn. Yet, for years, I struggled to let myself do the very same thing.

With some serious self-analysis, I'm more capable than ever at finding gaps in my own knowledge and slowly filling them.

I regularly tell people that I enjoy Rust. Is it my strongest language? Absolutely not. I also enjoy working with C++. I'm not nearly as confident in either of them as I am in other languages but, for a time, I pushed myself to write projects in them and make that public. Because it is more than okay to not have perfect code. Especially in a learning environment.

I think my biggest push was working on a mid-level two-dimensional game engine in C++ with SDL2 and forcing myself to sit on Twitch, live, and just code. I didn't expect viewers. I didn't expect commentary. But just doing it, openly, to take the risk to let anyone see, really was the push I needed.

Starless is my example of that. I've said this before, but Starless isn't perfect and I pushed myself to release it before I considered it "finished" specifically for this reason. Having something about your code, your projects, the things you've spent time doing is far more valuable than having a handful of "perfect" things.

Avoiding the sanity tax

Working with yourself in mind is something you need to do purely for your own sanity.

You need to be able to maintain where your role goes and what you do. What your career path actually looks like. That's incredibly important. If you can't look at your growth plans and find any joy in them, there's a much deeper problem than solely disliking your job.

The one thing that annoys me greatly, more than anything, is rigid fucking management. The sheer inability of being open-minded that a lot of companies seem to lack is utterly disheartening. I understand that there's a whole generation of people who still don't quite understand that work can be enjoyable or don't think it should be. And those people are clearly not okay.

Your career path, the thing you want to do most days for the next few decades, should absolutely be a pleasure for you to do. The fact you'd get paid for it is a bonus. It's already well-proven that people who enjoy their work are more efficient.

In my role, I have a blend of weeks. Sometimes, I'm code-heavy; other times, I'm admin-heavy. And I need to take a careful approach to both of those. It's no surprise that, after more than a decade, I'm burnt out on WordPress (which is a story for a whole other entry) but I do make it work. I have to think about my assigned tasks, what kind of mood I'm in, what I've been working on, and how my day looks to get my work complete, without burning out.

Some days, I absolutely don't mind spending hours writing a technical proposal, especially if it might potentially let me stop us hitting idiotic limits of the legacy architecture of WordPress. Other days, I need to turn my music on, mute Slack, and sit in code for a few hours.

I appreciate that it's not necessarily as easy for a lot of people in their roles, but we do all face things that we don't want to deal with sometimes. That's an unfortunate truth of engineering, especially if you maintain legacy projects. There is no magic fix — sometimes, you have to wade through the shit to reach the other side.

But the importance remains in your direction: you need to do what makes you happy. Even if there's some awkward conversations to be had around it. Otherwise, you'll find yourself so filled with dread about what you do, that it's going to slowly eat away at you until you can't take it anymore.

And don't think this is hypothetical. It's not. I've lived this.

Fin

I've written a lot above. I know I have. I would apologise but, if you've read up to this point, that's on you.

Starless was launched a couple of weeks ago which let me enjoy making improvements and writing posts. I even saw that Brent replied to my post about Tempest and actually linked to Starless on the community page. I loved that. I did want to reply but the past 10 days have been a struggle for reasons I don't necessarily want to delve into publicly. Not yet.

I needed time to recover, as I'm sure anyone does who's just read this post. And, truthfully, that's the summary of this entire post. Some days, you really do just need to switch off and let yourself recover.

As someone all too familiar with the depressing nag of productivity after a hearty day of media binging, I won't fall into the trap of forcing myself to "be productive" anymore. I know when I need to enter recovery mode and I do it willingly, otherwise I'm going to burn out. Hard.

I feel better having written this. There's, unfortunately, likely some more hurdles to face but I'm confident in facing them.