For ages, I’ve been worrying about why I was feeling really low on creativity. It’s hard to pin point what changed – was work more demanding? Social life fuller? Too tired at the end of the day because I just do so much more physically (in Canada even with a pretty intense gym regime I was at around 3000 fuel points a day, it’s now 50% higher, nearly as much gym time, much more wondering around).
I just felt like I had no observation to make, no insight to share. And after spending all day every day on the computer, the last thing I wanted to do in the evening or weekend is spend time on the computer.
And so I stopped making for fun, and then I stopped writing, and I kept looking for things that would inspire me. A new book, a new art exhibit, a new adventure to a new place.
Sometimes it would work, I would wonder around, talk to people, feel inspired, but then not manage to make the time to actually do anything with that inspiration. The longer it went, the higher the hurdle was to overcome. If I haven’t written in ages, I forget how easy it is when I find a topic that I’ve already considered a lot, how the words just flow, and with them, if I’m lucky, extra insights.
I found the desire (as yet still un-acted upon) to code for fun, in the strangest place. I didn’t find it in a 2 week computer-free trip to Europe (I took a laptop, packed the wrong charger, and then just decided not to use it). I found it in New Zealand, after a week of no coding, but so much social activity and outreach to women.
The need to write came back to me when I realised my life is currently boring.
All this time, I thought what I needed was something exciting enough that I overcome the “resistance” and carve out the time I needed.
It is hard to follow a post like my last one. It seems like it needs to be followed by something cheery, like, “I woke up this morning feeling GREAT and everything is now OK!” or “I fixed myself using <magic trick>”.
But there is no waking up one morning feeling great, and there is no magic. Just day after day of making it out of bed each morning. Taking the drugs and waiting for them to work. Going to a second (less judgy) counsellor, crying lots, and then sleeping for 12 hours. Realising that my posture had gone to hell, and walking a little straighter. Seeing he-who-was-known-as-the-boy and wanting to move to another country. Making a backup plan to move to another country. Coming home from a night out and realising I wasn’t just going through the motions, I was actually enjoying on myself. Crying on my birthday. Going on a date. Another one. Noticing for the first time in what feels like forever how beautiful the walk to work is.
Is this what being OK is? Maybe. It’s continuing. It’s feeling like a human again, albeit a slightly bruised and bitter one. So much drama, and what seems like so many men who crawled under the extremely low bar I set for their behaviour. Some relatively minorly – does it really matter what an ex says about your breakup? If things end in part because of their poor grip on reality it shouldn’t really come as a surprise to discover their version of things has little relation to my truth. But hurtful none the less. And <event> that led to <redacted>. <Event> was almost unsurprising, low bar, crawled right under it, but <redacted>, was supposed to fix things, well that was worse part of it. And then the creep.
It’s hard to rebalance the ratio of positive to negative interactions with the world, when you’re afraid to go out in it because who knows what new disaster awaits. But the drugs took the edge off that terror. And finally – finally! I can find things to be grateful for. I’m working on something cool, and I’m learning a lot. My parents have been great, my friends amazing, work and especially my manager have been awesome.
And, after so much drama and upheaval – moving! Crises! Breakups! I realised the other day that my life is currently boring.
My initial reaction was – panic! How do I make it more interesting? A project?
And then I realised, my life is boring. How fucking amazing is that?
In January, I was killing it. I’d been promoted, work was going well, I lived in a city I love, hanging out with an awesome group of friends and regular girls nights, and I was basically back to “normal” – athletic, but curvy, after 2 major injuries and, y’know, living in Suburbia and having to drive everywhere. And there was the boy. Figuring things out, busy schedules, he’d been sick, but good. Special.
Fast forward to March, and one morning last week, where after dragging myself out of bed (after spending 10 hours in it) I contemplate the bottle of baileys in my fridge rationalizing “well, people drink coffee for breakfast”. I made it out the door without acting on that impulse, on the way to work briefly contemplated the appeal of a week unconscious (“it would just be nice to have a break”), calmed myself down without drugs when I started to panic and got teary on-route. Made it. Did stuff. Drank 4 cans of cherry coke (willpower is depletable, I guess it was all gone by the time I got to the office). Went out. Went home. Slept.
Did it again the following day. That one was perhaps the lowest. Other days it was a drag, but I didn’t find myself having as many thoughts that were frankly scary. Tenuously held it together. Went through the motions. Finally realized that I understood that lyric from Everclear “Can you believe he actually thinks that I am really alive”. Going through the motions of being human, whilst feeling – at best – dead inside. At worst, just full of this crushing despair about the world.
This morning I got up after a reasonable 8 hours in bed, feeling ready to start the day. I don’t think this has happend since mid-January. I made it into body pump, even if I had to leave after the warmup (starting to feel sick and dizzy – I walked for 2 hours after dinner last night, and only managed to eat half a granola bar before the gym), but managed 90 minutes cardio.
And then I saw the boy, and let’s leave out the details but – we’re done, and I’m crushed. And it’s circumstances rather than anything about how well we get on, how much we care about each other. And that is devastating to me. I can’t hate him, I can’t even be mad at him. It makes sense in a horrible way that you wish weren’t true but you know, is. My last breakups have been those fundamental deal-breaking things where you know it’s for the best because people don’t change. This was the kind of thing where it seems like had a couple of external things been different, I wouldn’t be writing angsty blogposts but instead curled up on the sofa, watching a movie.
I hate that. I hate feeling like this thread was pulled in January, and everything started to unravel. And then another one with that creep on the plane. And that has somehow brought me to this place where I don’t even recognize myself in the scary thoughts that pop into my head.
The thread pulled in January, I can’t write about the details. It was something that I thought I left behind when I left Canada, but it followed me and hit a new low. I finally had the support here where I was allowed to be upset about the new thing, and that support came with process that is supposed to resolve things. That process may resolve things, but it was brutally unpleasant and didn’t leave me feeling any better, really worse. One of those things where if you don’t do it, there’s always the fear that it might make things worse, but the hope that it will make things better. It didn’t make things better. It was isolating, and meant I had to stop pretending that it was manageable – it wasn’t – and then I didn’t do something I wanted to, out of fear.
And then the creep. I told myself that is something that only has the effect on me that I let it. I got on a plane again. I was intimate with the boy – weirdly I felt that having someone I wanted to touch me, touch me, cancelled it out in some way.
But I don’t know anymore. I don’t fixate on <redacted>. I don’t fixate on the creep. I don’t fixate on the boy. I just feel this crushing despair. I think they only have the effect that I let them, and I try not to let them, but I don’t feel quite real.
So I’ve been going through the motions. Getting up every day. Got my hair cut and coloured. Go out with my friends. Go to the gym, even if somehow my epic 3-6 hour workouts have been replaced with 45 minutes on the x-trainer and wanting to lie down. Possibly related to me losing most of my desire to eat. But, y’know, still managing to do that. Limiting myself to two cherry coke’s a day (normally I don’t drink soda at all – only iced tea).
And I’ve realized how easy it is to pretend to be OK. There’s an hour in between waking up and getting up to psych myself up to do that. But the rules are easy – you get out of bed, you fulfill some basic level of grooming, you go to wherever you are supposed to be and do you best at whatever you are supposed to do. You try to ignore that this best isn’t your usual best. You say hi, smile, and take an interest in how people are doing. You go to the gym. You go out with your friends.
To pretend to yourself, you clean up your living space, celebrate the days you don’t cry, count how long it is since you last took a Xanax, and point to how you showed the outside world, and say – I’m functioning.
But the truth is – pretending to be OK, and being OK are two different things. My close friends know. And other people I try to minimise contact with, and think, hey, can you believe they think I’m really alive.
I got back from North America over a month ago. And since then I’ve been doing all the things you are supposed to do to feel better. Live in the world. Exercise. Socialise. I saw a shrink, which didn’t help at all. If you need 5 positive interactions to each negative one, then well, the world and I have not been getting that and I find myself at this catch-22 – I won’t feel better about things until I’m closer to that ratio, but I can’t go out and seek things until I feel less despairing in general.
A year ago, I left Canada because I felt that my life had disintegrated around me. <Redacted> had contributed to that. And now I find myself in an eerily similar situation. I thought about leaving again, but how would that help? People have tried to protect me from the affects of it, but what remains is how I feel, which affects everything. And then I just feel worse, because it’s still after me, it’s not over until I feel better. And I’ve done all the things I’m supposed to do, but I’m feeling worse every day.
My friend and I went to Bangkok for the long weekend. We relaxed in the spa, swam in the outdoor pool, explored the shops, got lost and wondered around the city. Rode in a tuk tuk.
I wondered, why it was that we spent more time at the hotel than I would usually. Than I did, say, when I was in Copenhagen last year. I realized it was the stress of being out and about, and worrying about things that we don’t usually have to worry about. That guy being helpful? Hoping he is just practising his English, until he tries to send us to a “special” mall with a “special” sale on, where if we were to go along with it, we would be pressured to buy overpriced jewels. Worrying about where our guide was, after he took us to watch precious stones being polished and oh, we do find ourselves in an overpriced jewelry store. Because that is a trick, apparently, they disappear, and you’re stranded, and voila, you can’t get away until you buy something. We found him, we didn’t buy anything, it was OK. But I don’t usually have to worry about that. I don’t usually have to bargain everywhere. I know I’m paying over the odds – I live in Australia… but so is everyone else.
It occurred to me how I took my safety like that for granted. From there, I went on to India where I actually ran away from someone who insisted on “helping” me and then followed me wanting money. I crossed the road – one of the most terrifying things I have ever done. Leaving India, on the way to the airport, I’m running later than I want to be (checking out was incredibly inefficient) and the driver asks me if 45 minutes to an hour is OK. I say, get there as fast as you can (not the best thing to say to your driver in India)… he gets there in 30 minutes, in a zooming, honking adventure. This part is important. It’s the last thing I remember doing, when I was not afraid.
When I teased the boy about the tuk tuk, asking if he worried about me, he said he just worried about me being in Thailand and India full stop, and why didn’t I vacation in a rich country instead. So at the airport, the developing countries part of my trip over, I messaged the boy, and told him he didn’t need to worry about me anymore.
The next time he hears from me, I’m crying hysterically and filing a police report.
It’s soon after takeoff, I’m so tired because the flight was at 4am and it had been a long day and I was so jet-lagged, having left Sydney about a week previously. And the guy sitting next to me, I guess the selection of movies was insufficient for his entertainment, because he starts touching me. He puts his hand on my leg, and I’m so tired and I have an eyemask on, so I can’t see, and, I think he must have just mistaken it for the armrest, and urgh but I’m so tired I don’t even really get what is going on. He puts his hand on my breast, and I tell myself I must be imagining things, is missing the boy making me crazy?
But by the second time his hand is on my breast, I know I’m not imagining things. And I know I’m not imagining his finger drawing circles on my back, and when he moves backwards and forwards and something hard touches my leg… I know I’m not imagining that.
And I’m weirdly calm. I just keep moving away, and I’m fixated on, well I can’t possibly sleep with this going on, and the next time he touches me I’m going to have to go and tell a flight attendent and get them to move me.
I wait.
He puts his hand on my breast again. I move, more sharply this time. He pretends to wake up like I’ve disturbed him, and I put on my sneakers. I get up, and he’s talking about how he’s so uncomfortable. I walk away, pretending I’m going to the bathroom. He follows me, telling me about how uncomfortable he is, some back problem, and how he is going to ask them to move him.
At the back of the plane I find a hostess but he’s behind me and starts talking. She sends him back to his seat, saying the plane is full. He goes back to sit down, and I say I’m going to look for a bathroom, and get away, walking around the back and up the other aisle.
It’s horrible when someone creeps on you, but on a plane, it’s extra terrifying. You’re trapped, there is no way to walk out. You’re powerless, hopefully the flight attendants will help, but what if they don’t believe you? What can you do? I wonder if this is why I waited so long, had to be so sure.
I find a bunch of flight attendants eating. And then I start crying. I’m hysterical. I speak at first to a female one – she’s nearest, and I think she will understand, but it is a male one who is more helpful. They sit me down, tell me I won’t have to go back. The creep arrives, and looks concerned – asks me if I’m OK. I lie and say I’m just having a panic attack. The male flight attendent gets physically between us – I was so grateful for that – and scares him away. I say, “that was him”. Someone gets the most senior flight attendent. More crying. Someone gets my stuff. More crying. They put me in business class. The male flight attendent tells me, “these men think they can get away with this, but they shouldn’t”. I can’t seem to stop crying. Luckily I have some stuff to take the edge off long haul flights – I take it. And cry, until I eventually pass out.
In the morning I wake up, surrounded by 15 dudes. It is business class, after all. And I’m still very upset, but calmer, and I tell myself – some men behave in an appalling way, and they will probably get away with it, but I am done making it easy for them.
So I tell a flight attendent I want to file a police report.
The plane lands. I am kept on board, so is the creep. I see him walk by. I feel dirty. The police come on. I write everything, ask for an extra page, and then another. I call the boy, and one of our friends, and cry. I don’t remember what they say. The male flight attendent is so kind, but eventually he has to go, and I’m distraught, and alone, in Germany, with 3 more flights and countless hours to California. I give the paper to the policeman, and he tells me the female (he makes a point of letting me know this) judge has already decided, there’s not enough evidence – my word against the creep – and she is letting him go.
And I knew this would happen. Eyes open, I filed that report knowing nothing would happen. But it’s still shocking to me that he’s not even put in a holding cell at all, he’s just had a minor 30 minute inconvenience, really. And I understand it’s his word against mine, but I could no more make it up than I could fly. It was so horrifying to me that I wasn’t even sure it was happening at first – I mean, who does that? Who does that?
Really the message is that he can try and sexually assault a minimum of one woman on his way to every country?
They let me off the plane, and I make my way through the airport. I’m not sure how I’m going to cope with my next flight, and it’s hours away. The boy calls me, and I cry some more. When I get to further into the building, I can see the desk where I can try and change my next flight, I pull to one side, against the wall, to finish our conversation.
And the creep walks past, sees me, and comes towards me. I panic, and run away, accidentally hanging up in the boy in the process. And I’m really stupid, I run in the wrong direction – he’s approaching me from the direction where the people are, and so I run to a place where it is deserted. And I am terrified. I am not someone given to being physically afraid, but I was. I really was.
And that is stupid. I am very fit. Physically extremely strong for a woman. I remember him as being toad-like, short, soft, wide-nosed, old enough to be my father. There is no question in my mind that physically, I could hurt him. But I ran away.
I called this emergency number we have, and someone talked me through the airport, into the lounge, looked at the map and the layout and told me he wouldn’t be able to get there given he was en-route to the US and I was travelling within the EU. Tried, but failed to change my flight. I waited in the lounge, spoke to my friends and the boy. Tried to calm down. Got on the next plane, sat in the window seat with two random dudes in the other seats, and spent it pressed against the window, sobbing.
My parents picked me up from the airport in the UK, and I cried some more. Slept – a little – and the next day was on my way back to another airport, trying to get to California. And I was panicking. I had submitted my upgrade request, but I didn’t know that I had got it and I was terrified. Unsure if I would manage to get on the plane if I didn’t. Freaking out about getting a taxi by myself at the other end. Thankfully I got the upgrade for the long flight (and the short one, as it turned out) and a friend messaged me saying she would be at the airport. I picked up chocolate and shortbread for my friends, and the guy at the counter complemented my henna. I did not freak out – I took this to be a win.
And I made it to California, exhausted, shaken up, but feeling that I had proven something to myself in having done that. But so weirded out by the change in me – that I had gone from being someone who would travel alone in India, tell the driver to get there as quick as he could, to this shaking, crying mess, who was afraid to take a taxi, period.
All week in California, I was kind of functioning, mostly focused on the flight home, and how I wasn’t sure I could cope with it, but also just desperate to get home to my friends and the boy. And of course I came home, and shortly after crashed. Before I realized, I knew my friends were worried, my manager was worried, and so I went to see my doctor, and he seemed oddly concerned as well but I was like “statistically, most women experience something like this” and then the next day I go to the gym early in the morning, 45 mins cardio, spin class, and 20-some laps and then I’m crying in the hot-tub not wanting to go to work.
And my experiences in a male-dominated world, another recent no fun thing that I had to go through and – statistically – most technical women do – were all jumbled up in it. And so my doctor sent me to see a shrink, and gave me some valium for the anxiety and panic I was feeling. The first time I saw her, I had taken valium the night before, and I think she thought I was basically OK. The second time, I wa not dosed up, and at the end of the session, she tells me, I’m angry.
And it’s like, of course I’m angry. I’m tired of making this choice – be a bitch, or be a pushover. I’m tired of the things that men feel it’s OK to say to me, the things they feel it’s OK to do. Tell me my opinion – on something entirely subjective – is worthless. Behave like a jerk, but then ask me for a favor. Tell me what I should think, how I should feel, what I should do. Suggest I should be a product manager. Suggest that I need permission to travel from my boyfriend.
I think about that guy at the airport when I left Canada who said something about me meeting a nice man in Australia.
I think about the guy who said to me recently, that I must be doing the wrong thing in the gym, because I spend a lot of time there and I should look better than I do. And then, when I looked horrified, said, “it’s not that you don’t look beautiful, it’s that you could look even more beautiful” – like what I was upset about what the suggestion I don’t look good enough, rather than my appearance is what defines my worth as a person. I mean, not a person, only a woman, to this man, another one, nearly old enough to be my father.
I think about the guy who suggested it’s fine that I don’t do something because I’m afraid. And I contrast him, with the others – who were just mad that I am afraid.
And I think about that creep at the airport, how he felt he could come towards me after that, after all of that, how I made it clear it was not OK what he did. And in my mind he’s coming to make more excuses, to tell me his hand slipped, like he was saying as he followed me around the plane. And what kind of insanity is that? How would he think that I would believe that? That his hand slipped and fell – very gently, hidden by a blanket, onto my breast, THREE TIMES.
I’m angry, because now I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what some men will do, the way they will justify their actions, the things they feel entitled to take, to do. I’m angry, because I don’t think things will get better. I’m angry because the choice is between bitch and pushover, and we can never win.
So I go kickboxing. I have a mean cross, a vicious hook, and I knee like I really freakin’ mean it.
It’s good to express how angry I am in a way that’s not crying, but it just reminds me of another reason I have to be furious. He touches me, but there is not enough evidence. If I hadn’t turned around, if I hadn’t run away, if I had broken his nose and stopped him from ever being able to replicate. Well his scars would be evidence, and that would be assault.
But what he did, that was just a man doing a horrible thing, and getting away with it, as they so often do.
I want to add – I realize that I had so many things here that another woman might not have – a working phone with which I could make international calls, an expense account and my own credit card that meant I could pay to change a flight, stay in a hotel, take a cab etc. An emergency number. Gold (elite) status, and lots of upgrade credits. Family at my stopover, and a close friend at my destination. I’m 27 and maybe look younger (especially when travelling, dressed low key with no makeup), in terms of women in their early, mid twenties, that kind of creep might prey on – I have more power than most. I hate to think about how some other woman without all that would have coped. The flight attendants were amazing, but once off the plane, I was alone. I should never have been in a position where he could see me and try and approach me in the airport. It’s horrifying. I wrote to the airline I was on (Lufthansa) and the airline I have status with (Air Canada) over two weeks ago now saying what had happened and pointing this out and… nothing.
This Thursday, it will be two months since I arrived in Sydney. I came to work on a specific project, and that project came with a pretty ambitious deadline. I don’t know if anyone, including the person who thought this deadline up, really believed we would make it. But we did, just about. We as a team, did. And that moment, where you can say, “yeah, did that” – pretty awesome. But there are moments that happen before that, where people start to look at what you’re doing, and say, “hey, you just might do that”, and those are pretty cool, too.
I ran this project. Which means if we didn’t make that deadline, it would be on me. Making it, well, good leaders give away credit and take blame. But I do get to feel satisfied. But the biggest thing I get to feel satisfied about, is that in the last two months, I have consistently worked around 40 hours a week. I have gone out, a lot, and found friends and things to do in Sydney. Got (kinda) settled in my apartment, even taken a day’s vacation. Worked out 4-5 times a week, and averaged 4.5k fuel points a day. My life is a little loopy, but it’s definitely diverse.
Extensive reading around personal development, and watching other people run things, and running my own, much smaller, things meant I had some ideas about Planning, Leadership, and keeping sane under pressure. So this is my three most important things in each area, most of which I tested by breaking at some point.
Software Development Planning In General
Eliminate your Known Unknowns
This is the most important thing. You have a feature set and a deadline, some things you know how to do, and some things you don’t.
The thing you don’t know how to do is the most important thing you need to do today. This unknown falls somewhere on the scale between being very easy, and being hard / time consuming / requiring someone else to change their thing / flat out impossible. The sooner you know what it is, the sooner you can adjust your estimates, or your features, to be more realistic.
Think Medium Term
I don’t hack. I worry, actually, that I literally can’t hack. I can’t fight with something, and be happy with a one line fix labelled “DO NOT TOUCH THIS”. I always need to understand why, and to rationalize why things interact, or work the way they do.
Hacking is short term thinking. I’m in a hurry, do this quickly, come back later. It borrows time from future-you, to save time today. But you don’t know when future-you is going to pay the bill. You might find it’s tomorrow (before you ship) – that’s the worst case. And hacks multiply, the more you have, the more expensive each one will be to fix, so here’s the next worst case, you ship something full of hacks, and now you can’t do anything interesting until you unravel them all.
The thing about long term thinking, is that the world is going to be different a year, hell, a month from now than it is today. Long term is an investment in the future, but you have no idea what the future is going to look like. Isn’t that one of the awesome things about working in tech? Everything changes, all the time.
Medium term is the balance, and I find when I think medium term I know what issues will result from that decision, and I know roughly when they will occur. Choosing X over Y will mean that we have to adjust some things, in a relatively minor way, if we do Z, but I’m confident Z won’t be on any of the next few iterations I’m OK with that, but document it somewhere.
Medium term is doing things that will get harder over time sooner rather than later. In this case, Y is a pain, but needs to happen for Z. If we do it now, it’s very easy, and has and intermittent slightly higher overhead for a while. If we wait, it becomes a huge problem that takes someone a long and miserable time to unravel.
Ruthlessly Prioritize
Feature creep is the biggest problem with tight deadlines, and the temptation is always to slip things in because “things are looking so good”.
But why are things looking so good? Because you eliminated so much of this stuff. Because you were ruthless in the first place.
UX wants the widget to slide in and out, but when they realize it is as much work some feature, maybe they will reconsider.
I think it’s pretty easy to eliminate the large things, if you are ruthless about it, you’re clear about how long things take, and your PM and UX people are realistic. The thing to watch here is the small things. I find these are the things that I could fix in an hour or less, and it’s tempting to just agree to them, because it wouldn’t take much more time to write the code than have the conversation – and coding is more fun than having meetings! But I think you get 4-6 hours of good coding a day. So 4 “little things” and you’ve just allocated most of your day away, and were these things the most important things you could be doing?
Maybe not.
Leadership
Give Away The Stuff You Know
It is super tempting to look at the list of things to do, identify the things that you know and could do quickly, and just get cracking on them. You’ll feel an awesome sense of accomplishment, you’ll make super fast progress, and then there will be barely anything left, so that won’t take long at all.
This is complete nonsense. Especially if you have new people who you don’t know. If you give them something you know, you can evaluate how they do it, provide guidance, easily conceptualize it in the bigger picture. If there’s an issue with it down the road, you’ll be able to fix it.
And, importantly, you can instead work on one of your Known Unknowns. And when you’ve figured that out, you give that away too, so you are continually at the boundary of what you know and what you need to do, figuring out how it all fits together. You have the big picture in your head, and enough detail on everything to dive into it at need. Maybe you don’t know anything the best, but you can rationalize about everything, and that is really, really useful.
One of the biggest mistakes I made, that came closest to causing us to miss the deadline, was that I gave away something I only 50% knew how to do. I missed something crucial, and it became an emergency as a result.
This isn’t about being a control freak, it is about you knowing enough about everything, even if there is nothing you know everything about.
Learn Your Superpowers
I learned one of my most important lessons about leadership from someone I worked with, not at the time, a year after the fact.
We worked at a camp, and she was the director. A year later she tells me, “I always used to show you the numbers of how many kids we had in each class, because you would just remember them”. And so she could ask me at any time and I would just know. I could also lay out the classrooms in my head at need.
This, to me, was completely normal, so it didn’t occur to me that not everyone would remember a list of numbers after seeing them. But my friend knew it wasn’t, so she used it to make her life easier, and I never even noticed her doing it.
I think people can be really bad at knowing what they are good at. They don’t always value or notice things that are so natural to them that they don’t realize they are doing them. The more you notice about it, the more you can give people the things that they are fantastic at. The person who has a really good eye for UI flow, and usability, they get that slightly un-specc’d feature. The person who is really stubborn and diligent gets that tedious problem that is going to take patience and bloody-mindedness, rather than a flash of brilliance to fix.
Create a Space
This is about balancing the desire and need to shield your team from the outer world – politics, negotiations, long term planning, and the need to situate what you’re doing in some wider coverage.
Too little shielding, and too many people are worrying about things they have no control over. Too much, and your decisions can seem arbitrary and unfounded.
Some things are “PM problems”. I can’t do anything about them, but I need to know the status of them. I stay out of them and try not to worry about them. I probably want to share that there is a PM problem, when it is clear that it is going to hold something up.
Eng problems I’ll share as they come up. Like, I know it seems like I’ve gone mad on test coverage, but this is coming from these directions and this is why it’s important. I know it’s frustrating that we are doing X, but there is this medium-term plan of doing Y, and investing in X now pays dividends then.
Personally
Don’t Miss What You’ll Resent
I took a day off to go skiing. I knew if I missed it, I would be sad and resentful that I didn’t ski during the winter here. So I went, and it really energized me. Those things if you miss out on, you’ll really miss, you don’t want to lose out on those. Your work is part of your life, it’s not something that should happen at the expense of it. And your life is not something you should put on hold for something that is not 100% under your control.
Don’t Borrow From Tomorrow
My theory of working late is that in the best case I borrow time from tomorrow, and in the worst, I do that and I break things, which I then also need to fix.
So when I feel like I’m done, I go home. I go home well before I start breaking things. One of the things I find as a result, is that I am consistently productive 5 days a week. There’s less of a range. In grad school, I had insanely productive days, and some which were just a write-off. There was so much variance, that it was really hard to know how much I could get done in a given week. Now I have a pretty good idea, and I have evenings and weekend to myself, both of which greatly improve my happiness.
It’s Not Just Hours, It’s Energy
Last Thursday night, my friend and I are in a cab headed out to a comedy show. We were running late, because we’d both been completely absorbed in what we were doing and hadn’t really considered how we were getting there, or even where we were going, and there was terrible traffic.
And we got there, and had a great time, but waiting in the traffic jam, I admit that I think Thursday nights should be reserved for the gym and mall food (the mall food here is delicious, and the mall is only open late on Thursdays).
My friend says “Yes! By Thursday, I have made so many decisions, that if I don’t recharge I have no decisions left for Friday”.
Even the “worst” weeks I had probably didn’t exceed 45 hours. The most stressful day I had, I finished working before 5. But that didn’t mean I had any emotional energy left when I left the office for the day. I was exhausted.
And it’s hard to go out with someone new, when there’s really only one thing on my mind and I just feel like I have no conversation. I have to make more time to do things that recharge me – reading novels, hanging out at the gym watching How I Met Your Mother. The morning after the most stressful day, I went in late because I felt compelled to spend 2.5 hours in the gym before I could face the next onslaught. The biggest challenge I’ve had, is feeling like because I leave the office by 6 I have the time and energy for daily early morning workouts and going out almost every night, and I just don’t. I’d sooner work out in the evening, because it decompresses and de-obsesses me before bed. I want 9 hours sleep when I’m stressed. And that’s OK.
On a recent Monday morning, I was barely awake and not keen to get up, I thought, “wow, I feel terrible. Why do I feel so terrible?”
And a little voice in my head answered, “it’s because you flew economy on Friday”.
And then I hated myself. I mean, sure, if I’d flown economy from Europe or California, but we’re talking a one hour flight from NYC. What is wrong with me?
Less than a week later, I’m picking up a pair of shoes for my friends wedding. My feet have somehow grown and none of my existing shoes that would match my outfit fit me. And then I find myself owning my first pair of Jimmy Choos. And on the one hand, I’m totally proud of me that I could just do that. On the other, I completely judge myself because, it’s a pair of shoes. And I could have loaned that money on Kiva, or donated it to GHC, and I didn’t. I bought shoes. Fabulous shoes. But shoes.
Talking to a friend who has genuine, normal person problems. And me, I’m agonizing over which amazing place should I go and be extremely well paid to do something that I love. Yes, hard decision, but also one that most people don’t understand – and why would they? Oh, poor me, I have to choose between two fantastic options. I could be happy with either, but which is the best. Oh, the agony.
Seriously though, I cried over this. I was torn up inside, changing my mind on a daily basis. But by the standards of humanity, it’s not exactly a problem.
Weird situation, because as a woman in tech, professionally I’m not really privileged. I am other, and I feel other on a daily basis. I did not start coding as early, I do not get scifi cultural references, I encounter things, from time to time, that maybe guys wouldn’t encounter (and really, if I question whether it would happen to a guy, that’s more than half the problem). But, as a little white girl making a software engineering salary, in the wider-world, I am tremendously privileged. And sometimes I look at the things I worry about, and it concerns me that this is what I worry about.
For example, I spent a disturbing amount of time last week trying to figure out a one way flight from the UK to Sydney, such that I could stop in Tokyo and pick up the best chocolate in the world, with the constraint that it had to be star alliance (and, ideally, not economy). This kind of thing is an interesting problem in terms of tradeoffs (you can also get this chocolate in Singapore, but maybe not at the airport) and optimization. But it’s also a little unhinged.
I feel like I have stopped living in the real world. And this bothers me, because I don’t know how to go back to the real world.
It’s like, the things I worry about are either completely intractable and seemingly unfixable, like those of gender inequality in a male-dominated environment… or completely ridiculous.
My biggest frustration with other people, is if they do not seem to have a strong grip on reality. But really, I have to look at my life and wonder – how do I retain my own? (It might already be gone).
It’s weird being single again. When things weren’t great, when I wasn’t happy – when I didn’t think things would work out, I never thought ahead to this point. Saturday night with nothing to do. Putting a friend down as my emergency contact on a form.
It’s good. I’m not down about it. I was at peace with the outcome before it even happened, but the process left much to be desired. The process, that was upsetting.
Really, I feel like we broke up three weeks before we actually did, as that was when we had that (final) argument, and my ex stopped speaking to me. And since then, I’ve been in California, New York (twice), Sydney, and Ottawa. Flitting around by myself is not new, and in many ways not much had changed. It was when I stopped rushing around that things seemed different. Having my wisdom teeth out my friends were awesome, and took care of me, but then I spent the weekend alone in the kind of state where making it out to the store to pick up some (soft) food was an achievement.
I spent about 48 hours off my head on narcotics post-surgery. The most relaxed I have been in… a long time. And during this, I contemplated having a nose job (possibly due to my dropping my ipad on my nose, a fact that I had forgotten until I noticed the bruise, Monday morning). And I also contemplated dating women, as in, why am I not doing that instead? Sober, there is, of course, a pretty simple answer to this! But I’m burned out on the drama, and the anger, and the stress of untangling two lives that used to be entwined. I always thought the downside of dating women would be the emotional drama. The latest breakup had enough emotional drama to fuel the breakup of two teenage girls.
But I was OK, until I ended up back at the dentist in so much pain I was nearly in tears, and he gave me a syringe to clean out the holes where my wisdom teeth used to be and told me to “have your hubby do it”. I said, “I don’t have a husband”, a fact so surprising the nurse had to repeat it, and he said, “oh, your parents then”. My parents are in Europe. “It’s easier if you have someone else”. Well I don’t! That day, I did not feel quite so great about being single. He also told me that I was fine to work, but try debugging with a minimum of a constant low level pain (and often much worse) whilst feeling nauseous from consuming more painkillers in a couple of days than I’ve taken in the entire last year.
The plan is, I’m moving. The move is a story for it’s own blog post, once it is definite. I’m currently operating on the basis that it is happening, but don’t really believe it will. My friend where I’m going says, “we can go to these singles meetups if you want”, and I say, “I spend all day surrounded by dudes. The last thing I want to do in the evening is meet more dudes”. Another friend, with no knowledge of this conversation, suggests I go on OKCupid to meet some people pre-move. They both have a point, but currently, I feel like, what’s the point? So I can spend time on another man, who will eventually be an ex I don’t speak to? Why bother?
I met my dad in Ottawa, he was on his way to DC (he travels at least as much as I do), and he says to me that he worries about me seeming untethered to anything.
I am untethered. That’s why I can pack up my life and relocate to another continent next month. And I’m excited for that adventure, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who I think would be worth giving that freedom up for. It’s possible that there are people who have that kind of hankering for adventure too, but I haven’t found that either.
In a world where we didn’t have the options that we do, there might not have been the moment where I looked at my ex and realized, we are just too different. But I do have those options. It’s been the case for a while that men have chosen the kind of weird nomadic life that I have and had wives go along for the ride. But statistics show that a professional women’s partner will tend to be another professional, and that is a constraint. I don’t want someone to keep house and raise the 2.4 children, I want another adventurer who chooses the same adventures that I do. Or I’ll have my adventures alone, or with more transient company. And that is okay.
I had a fling. It ended, and I missed it. And then, I saw the alternative reality, the ending of it where it was more than a fling – a dramatic, heartbreaking, mess, of compromises too big to make, because there are limits to how much people can really change (not much). And I was just so grateful that it had happened, to remind me that it does – sometimes boy meets girl, boy and girl have fun. I needed it, but I didn’t need it to last forever. That ending was OK. Given the choice, it’s the one I want.
Not sure where I’m going with this other than, romance – it’s at least NP-hard.
Travel gives me a lot of time to think, the planes, the airports, the queues. And the jetlag – there’s no lonelier time than four in the morning, wherever you happen to be.
Probably clear from my last post that I’ve had a lot to think about, lately. Still going to have to be enigmatic and elusive (sorry!), but things are looking up.
Currently, I oscillate between fear that things can’t just work out the way it seems like they might, and this calm conviction that three months from now my life if going to be unrecognizable, and all this chaos and drama is going to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.
I’m not normally a big fan of poetry, but there is one poem that I like – One Art by Elizabeth Bishop.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.
I think she is saying it is a disaster, but still. I find it comforting. It’s hard to feel your world falling to pieces around you; it’s hard to lose the things you cling to. Yes, it brings potential, but at 4am that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to cry – that loss seems insurmountable, at the loneliest time of day.
And I just let it be. OK, this is my worst case scenario. It is not, in fact, a disaster. And, interestingly, the more I activate my best-case scenario, the more the worst-case scenario seems like a precious thing that I don’t want to lose, either.
At 4am, I look at myself and realize that I are not the person I aspire to be. I know that in a different reality I might have talked about change a lot, but been unable to actually do it because I wouldn’t have wanted to let go of something. But the something is breaking apart, and as that happens – it tells me to go for it. It’s time.
When I get stressed travelling, I have this mantra that I repeat to myself:
Passport, wallet, keys, cellphone. Everything else you can buy.
It doesn’t mean that losing/forgetting something else might not be expensive, or a giant pain to fix. The point is, that only the loss of some things is a genuine crisis. I can’t pretend that I have a handle on everything, but those 4 things I can probably keep track of.
When things are uncertain, I try to anchor myself around things that I know.
Which is hard when things disappear, and for me April has been a month of that. My bike was stolen, from a locked room in a locked building. And not only did I lose my bike, I also lost my feeling of safety at home. My boyfriend and I broke up, and he hates me now. He always said that whatever happened, we were too reasonable to be acrimonious about it. This was always my worst-case scenario. Sometimes it sucks to be right. And two more things, one of which seemed the most important thing ever until the second thing went, and now seems trivial. And the second, which has left me devastated.
I can’t talk about what the two things are, but in some ways it doesn’t matter. The point is – three out of four of these things were anchors for me. My home is safe. My boyfriend was like my closest friend, and had been a close friend for years. And losing anchors, leave me adrift and lost and confused. The world is huge, and I would like something certain to cling to, and right now I feel – I got nothing.
Of course I don’t. I have great friends, geographically disparate (which, weirdly makes me feel even less anchored – go here, that’s where A is, but B is in this place, which is not a bad option either). I have money. I have places I could live. But perhaps this is it – I have options, and no certainty. And that makes me nervous.
Out for dinner with two friends. One of whom gives the best hugs. They make me feel so safe. He says, “everything is going to be OK”. My other friend looks at me like she thinks I’m a little crazy and says, “I don’t know why you are afraid. I have never seen you in a situation that you couldn’t handle”.
I’d like to make her certainty, my certainty. That whatever happens, I’ll figure it out. Because that’s also how I make my other friend right – I’ll figure it out, and then everything will be OK.
And I realize that, uncertainty is hard, and stressful, but with it comes possibility. And anchors are hard to lose, but without them, you’re very free.
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