The past few years have been a struggle.
I had gotten stuck in an abusive job. I say "had gotten" because it was a gradual process. By the time I realized it was hurting me, I was unable to leave. It was endless, endless crunch, and there was never a point between projects where I could gracefully make my exit.
And because Tiffany worked there too, burning the place to the ground — a less graceful exit — was never an option.
I ate like shit. I drank too much. I didn't sleep. I worked double shifts, weekends, holidays. I developed an ulcer. I pushed through it. I developed another ulcer. I pushed through that.
That's the Midwest way, right? Fuck it. Something needs doing, do it, and rest when you're dead.
It always looked like there was going to be a break after this project, just gotta make it through this one and then I can escape…
Five years later, I finally quit.
Sort of.
I stopped accepting new development projects from this firm, and began phasing myself out of their old ones. Tiffany quit a year after that.
Slowly but surely, free time began to return.
I released a handful of plugins and developer tools. I joined the WordPress Core Media Team.1 I caught up on my GoodReads list.
Quality of life should have started ticking upward, but instead the newfound downtime created a space for vivid, stressful mental loops: "flashbacks" and, because sometimes I remember the future, "flashforwards".
So naturally I identified free time as the enemy and tried to bury myself in other — hopefully better! — work. And that strategy worked well, until it didn't.
Eventually things got bad enough I decided to see a therapist and, well, here we are.
It's a process…
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Unfortunately this proved to be even more abusive and toxic… ↩