bendem's blog

Disclaimer

I’ve written this post 4 years ago, in a time when life was pretty bad, I found it in my stash of drafts and thought it was worth publishing uncorrected, unedited. Because life isn’t always great, because it’s important to speak about the bad so others know it’s ok to open up. Because I thought I was alone at that time and it would probably have relieved a bit of my pain if I had known I wasn’t the only one feeling like this.

Today the future is bright, I switched job a year ago, found something I could invest myself in that has purpose and doesn’t drain me completely. I met someone I want to spend my life with, someone I’m happy to wake up with every day, someone that knows when I’m not ok and tells me it’s alright. Someone who’s not always ok, but who, I feel, can talk to me about it. It’s not always easy, there are times where I feel like going back to being a vegetable, but they pass. I learned that speaking up when you feel bad is ok. I learned it’s ok to cry. In fact, I’m crying right now, remembering how bad it was and how good it has become.

Original text:

Making decisions is hard for me. Like, real hard.

Buying this brand or that one, going home early, staying up late, contacting a friend, going to an event, deciding what to eat or what to watch next. Those are just some of the decisions I have to make; and to be fair, most of the decisions I don’t make.

You see, most of the things I do in my life are to reduce the amount of choices presented to me or to avoid making decisions altogether. Online services give me propositions about what to watch, eat or play so that I don’t have to choose myself. The internet has made it easy to order something from home so that I

I don’t have social interactions because interacting with people is all about making decisions. Some hard, some easy, but the more people, the more choices, the more extenuating.

Simple example; going to a restaurant:

• Which one?

  • Something with not too many choices on the menu
  • Somewhere not too far

• When?

  • Does that mean I have to leave work early?
  • Is it close to me or do I need to plan my trip in advance?

• With who?

  • That’s generally fine as I don’t invite people to restaurants (so I’m not the one making that decision)

• How to get there (goes with when)?

  • Do I need to plan a route to get there
  • Do I need to plan a route to come back?
    • Do I have an hour I want to be back at?

• What to wear?

  • What’s my level of comfort with each person that’ll be present?
  • Will someone judge what I wear in the presence of someone else?

• What to eat?

  • I just can’t take menus, so I’ll eat whatever comes first that I know I’ve eaten and linked (that’s generally, pastas or cheese)

• Social interactions

  • What to speak about?
    • What happened recently that’s worth mentionning in a conversation
    • Is it an appropriate subject to talk with each person that will be there
    • Has that person had any recent event that makes it inappriopriate?
    • How likely is it that I’m not aware of some?
  • Who to speak to
    • Where to sit to be close to the person with whom blanks will be the less awkward

And those are just some of the thoughts that I have when deciding if I’ll go or not. Then comes the real challenges: The Unknown. All the decisioins I could not make in advance. The ones I didn’t think of, the ones couldn’t predict…

My brain is constantly analysing how many choices I’ll have to make for each action I take.

When I was in school it was easy. Choices are very little impact. Decisions were made by my parents, my teachers, my friends, all I had to do was follow them. Then the studies got harder, I had to actively choose to study to pass. I didn’t, I almost gave everything up. I made one decision that seemed at that time like the biggest choice I had made so far. I chose to finish my studies and actually get that piece of paper at the end that was worth both nothing concrete, and everything to get me started to enter the real world.

Once I made that decision, I did everything in my power to pass, but I just had drained all my decision power. For 6 months I didn’t speak to friends outside of uni, I didn’t play, I didn’t learn anything that wasn’t pointed toward school project, I didn’t discover new musics, I just let everything that wasn’t school unfold with the literal minimum amount of choices possible.

Now I’m done with school, the company at which I did my intership offered me a job and I gladly took it. The package they proposed was good and the problems I’d solve there looked interesting. Of course the real reason I took it is that I didn’t have to look by myself, I didn’t have to decide what to do.

But the field I chose, software development, it’s full of decisions, trade-offs, interactions. When I started I was excited, I’ll better the software, I’ll update our infrastructure, I’ll contribute to this world. Then I had to take decisions, small ones, I got involved in a lot of stuff, and now I’m responsible for most. And I have to make decisions, and I don’t want to, and everything is stuck a bit further than when I first started.

And then recently we started hiring, because we had many projects, many clients, also because I got involved in so many things that I started to show signs of fatigue.

Except someone had to teach the new developpers, and who better than me to guide them, since I was involved in so many systems? So now I’ll feel like a project manager, I struggle to find time to develop. Not because I have too much work. But because I have so many decision to make. “What to do?”, “Is that correct?”, “Does this code look ok?”, “Should we upgrade our framework?”, “Can we move to another technology?”, “What can I do now?”, “And now?”… I just can’t make that much decision and keep the level productivity I had.

So I’m less productive at work, and I’m a plant at home. I eat whatever is in my fridge, when my fridge is empty, I eat my reserve of pastas (yes, I have about 8KG of pastas for when that happens), then I order the first food that’s recommended to me. Then when I really have no choice, I go buy something fill my fridge, I refill my pasta stash, and I start over.

I’ve stopped going to the hackerspace (I go to twice a week generally), I’ve started lying to friends again. Telling them I was ok, telling them I had so much going on I couldn’t see them. Telling myself I didn’t have time to contact them.

Snooze, shower, bus, work, bus, youtube/neflix, sleep. Over and over again.

Sometimes I get sparkles of decision power left. Generally it comes on sunday’s eve, after almost 2 days without decision, I can finally decide something. Today, it was fixing my VPS' config and writing that post. I’ll probably never get enough decision power to publish it. That’d mean polishing it, turning it into actual content instead of random ideas thrown in a document, stripping it of the most personal parts I’m not ready to share publicly on the internet, s/draft = true/draft = false/. That’s just not happening.

But hey, I did something today. Took three hours of my weekend to write how I felt. That’s more than what I expected I’d be able to do when I got home on friday.

Maybe next week I’ll see some friends, probably not. In the meantime, I’ll clear my youtube queue; no decisions there. And if it’s empty, I have a series in progress on Netflix, no decision again.