Why you must prioritize mental health

Tl;dr I am slowly learning to live with a severe depression, my career is failing, but at least I am not alone.

When I had my first ever internship during my BSc, my mind was filled with nothing but excitement. I was finally doing the thing I studied years for. I was going to apply what I have learned in a company that will benefit from the things I know. Sure, I start at the bottom of the ladder, but surely if I do well I will do better, right?

I continued working there as a student. In hindsight, I did so in a very demotivated state. I told myself it was because I was also doing school aside from it. I knew deep down that it didn’t matter what I had to do, because I didn’t feel motivated to do the work I was assigned.

When you’re a junior, that’s not an issue. You’re learning, you’re bound to write bad code.

But this feeling didn’t go away. It was the same setup for my final internship. I started very confidently, very motivated, and after week three I had lost motivation. For some reason it didn’t stick to me.

… and the moment you get into the real world, doing a real job, it’s going to affect your performance. I had two jobs, both I have been fired from. In both of them there was a pattern. This was the feedback I got from both:

• Communication is not good. I start things without discussing them first. This lead to frustrations
• The work i was assigned to do gets done very slowly (with no communicating). People get frustrated, some more audible than others.
• The work that I did deliver was just not of quality. Acceptation environments kept going down and customers got angry. This lead to my manager and other colleagues getting stressed because they could not trust that my work was working.
• I kept telling myself “well, if X broke because of my change, then we must make sure X cannot have this mistake”. While i still do not disagree, it’s obvious I was ignoring the task I actually needed to do, which was to test this more thoroughly before I deploy.

I always figured others had similar issues and worked through it. The older I get, the more I realize that this isn’t the case. It’s not like “everyone has the same issues I have, and have succeeded to live through it, so I should be able to do so as well”. I kept asking people questions in the hopes that their answers would reveal that they have been feeling a similar way. Turns out I’m the only one. I realize that while others also have issues, they are in no way similar.

I basically went from a confident wanting-to-be systems engineer (that even got a great job offer that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do), to questioning everything I ever did. As of today I seem to fuck up the simplest tasks.

At first I blamed the companies I worked for. Granted, they’re not perfect, but what made me realize I am in the wrong is that others with similar situations seemed to have been doing fine. I blamed my inexperience, but someone less experienced did my job just fine. I blamed the boss for being an idiot (this never went away, I still think my bosses are idiots, but it seems to work), but even they saw how bad I was performing. I blamed my surroundings, which wasn’t very fair. At the end of the day, you can name a dozen things that might affect your perfomance, but it’s just not going to cut of.

So something was up with me. Something that I was doing was not working for the companies I worked for. If I’m honest, I still have no idea. My theory is discipline, but right now I have no mental space to work onthis.

The work I do is sloppy. I start the tasks I get assigned, get far, but I do not finish it and just start working on other things. I multi-task and forget to put the dots on the I’s and J’s

LLMs came and made this much easier. I could let the LLMs do the multitasking for me. I would scope out a ticket, start working and be done. Obviously LLMs have proven to lead to sloppier code, because you do not follow a path anymore where you need to test the thing you’re working on. It’s not that you don’t need to test anymore, but there is no path that forces you to test it. In theory you can ask it to do the task and commit whatever it barfed out.

This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that’s a diagnosis, not a root cause.

I’m sure your first thought is “well, just do X next time and go on with your life”. The problem is that tomorrow it’ll be something else I screwed up. I do not feel like I have the mental space to keep track of everything I need to do, and I do not even feel like I am aware of what I’m doing anymore. It feels like my mind is about to explode with thoughts.

I have been diagnosed with a severe depression, taking fluoxetine and oxazepam, and I will be living on benefits for now, so I can take time to heal. I would love to work again, but it’s not in the cards for me at this time. I can still do some open-source contributions, but I do want to make sure that the work I do is beneficial.

I would like to say that, despite being negative about our healthcare (who isn’t, right?), I am very grateful of the help I have received from my GP, PAPC, as well as my friends and family who are all there for me. Step one for me was to communicate with them. I realised that a lot of the frustrations piled on top of my depression were due to my lack of communication with them. Not saying how you’re feeling leads to people misunderstanding you. There’s a lot of regrets I have in life that could’ve been prevented by just saying the right things. It’s important to think further than just what you need at that moment, and to see the bigger picture. The hardest thing I had to realize is that sometimes things do take time, but that doesn’t mean to just abandon whatever it is. It means to fight for it, but to not rush it.

I started last year with posting a lot of inner thoughts on my blog. I have since deleted all of them (if you really care enough, they’re still in the git history). I had no one to discuss this with (this should’ve be a specialist, but I didn’t have one at the time), so I ended up posting them online. The responses I had gotten from those were interesting. It was HN being HN. Some found it slightly relatable, some nitpicked a sentence and let their verbose vocabulary loose on that single sentence, some just thought I was being whiney. That’s fine, because all of those might be true at the same time.

In the end, I would like to live a stable life, with a stable job. I would like to be proud of the work I do. I would like to be proud of the colleagues I work with. I do not want to feel like I need to leave the company I work for. I do not want to feel like I need to leave my home.

I want that fight or flight out of my system.

I was told it’s going to take a year with therapy, at least.

When I feel like I’m ready, I will probably not be doing software development for a while. I do not feel like I will do a good job, and I do not want to become a burden to a company.

My goals for the end of 2027 are as follows:

• Stop making stupid mistakes. I want to be able to finish a task fully without missing or skipping a step. One way to do this is to make a plan for everything you do, and only do that thing. Nothing else.
• Be proud of what I deliver. I need to figure out why I keep getting demotivated at work. Is it me? Is it the work? What work can I do in this state? What state do I need to do the work I want?
• Find stability. I already have friends/family going for me, so that is nice. I still need a stable job, and obviously I do not want to become a burden to my surroundings.
• I think to gain stability I will need to gain work discipline. I am not sure how I will get this. When my mind is a bit more clear, I will do my best to gain this work discipline myself.