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Having just spent a wonderful three days with Sam in Phoenix, I am happy to say that I feel far more balanced than when I was leaving New Jersey. When I left New Jersey after two weeks of break I felt like I was clinging onto a life raft, at the mercy of the current tides of the day. If the day was not going well I risked falling into my black abyss. Having gotten so close to it I can articulate what it looks like. It looks like loneliness, absolute and unforgiving. The metaphor is apt because I feel like it is the default condition. In the absence of doing anything – of maintaining relationships, of setting goals, of seeking out things that give me peace and calm, I would be alone, sitting on a couch in a dark apartment, isolated, just me and my anxious thoughts. Drowning. It is a scary feeling, so scary that I project it onto people in less fortunate situations. I see friends from high school in unfulfilling jobs, living alone in a bleak, cold New Jersey landscape and I shiver. If I was there I would be supremely unhappy. I need to unpack this further – why?

It is interesting to think about why going home resulted in such a strong reaction on my part. One easy thing to point to is the difference in environment – a sunny, beautiful city, with people bustling everywhere. A home that I find utterly beautiful and deeply tranquil, filled with people I love. New Jersey is cold and unforgiving, the suburbs are eerily quiet, and finding places where people congregate is hard. I think I need to be surrounded by people, by energy, even if I am not engaging with it. I do love the house I grew up in and I love the people in it even more, but it can be hard for them to relate to what my life is day to day. That extends outside of my immediate family and to everyone else: I do not know a single person in New Jersey that finds enjoyment in their jobs besides my parents.

When I was home I also felt like I lost my sense of purpose. My purpose right now is making sure that Shortcuts does well, and when I was home I did not have that. Purposeless is a deeply unpleasant feeling. I don’t have anything to do and it’s not relaxing. A vacation could in one sense feel like putting things on pause, but this time it did not feel like it. It felt like I had lost my sense of purpose. I wish I had discovered early on that even cleaning the house felt great – it feels great to have a job to do and even better when it is helping out my parents. Thinking further, I think this is likely a deeper thing. I think for some number of reasons – the company trying to fire Ari, my change in role, things starting to feel less new – I think the passion for my job at the end of 2019 went down. Thinking on it now, I think I feel fucking imposter syndrome in my job as a manager. Yes, that thing that people would talk my fucking ear off about and that thing that I felt I was always immune to. Under no circumstances would I consider myself a good manager, yet. Ayaka is the epitome of organization and Ari, as disorganized as he is, is a natural born leader and incredible at his job. I feel somewhere in between. I am disorganized as hell, and have trouble bringing myself to do non-technical organizational work. I don’t know how my team feels about me and I worry that I am not supporting them in the best capacity that I can. As I write this, I am telling myself that I am trying as hard as I can, and in my honest opinion, I don’t feel it is good enough. I am now uncontrollably crying. I love that I don’t think I fall for the classic high-performer mental traps, but here I am, a victim of both imposter syndrome and lacking self-empathy. As a meta-note, I can’t believe that these discoveries resulted from simply typing this shit out and forming a narrative on myself. Writing is like working out in that you forget what you are missing until you do it. Man that feels great.

I had previously articulated this feeling as "losing control" but that is as vague as "feeling kind of off". I feel (felt?) like I am losing control because the bedrock of my identity slipped out from underneath me without me even noticing it: being the fucking best at what I do. I need to understand that yeah, sure, I can be the best in the world at my specific niche of programming, but if I try to do anything else it’s going to be hard. It’s going to take work, and I need to be okay with being bad at it. I need to if I am going to honestly evaluate my performance and work on bettering it. I need to work on applying my strengths and, more importantly, attacking my weaknesses when it comes to this new role. I need to leverage my calendar to get myself to focus. I need to delete Xcode to resist the urge to solve problems with code. I need to allocate time to focus on each person on my team individually. More importantly, I need to take my job more seriously. Code can be late, it can be buggy, it can be poorly designed. That’s code. My team is made up of real people and it is my fucking responsibility to be in their corner and to do right by them. It is my job to help them grow, to find success, and to be happy in their career. The only thing worse than me being unhappy in my job is my team being unhappy in theirs. To be fair, I am sure that the lens I am focusing on myself is itself unfair – I’m probably doing okay. If I ever get my performance review from Ari, it will probably say as much, and it might even have some helpful tips on how I can improve myself. But I need to jump on this fear and have it burn me in the ass until I don’t feel imposter syndrome anymore. Now I’m hyped – let’s fucking crush this shit.

It’s funny to reflect on my 2020 goals with this larger realization unearthed – they are all focused around this idea of discipline even though none of the goals even mention my job. I was just dancing around the fact that work was the thing making me feel undisciplined. That said, I still love that theme. My relationship with weed was becoming more dependent over time, a way to let off steam and relax at night. Drugs are great, don’t get me wrong, but I need to re-strengthen my ability to handle stress without weed. My ability to navigate stressful situations with clarity and focus is one of my greatest strengths, and one of my foils to Ari. Ari deals with stress by tying it into a tight knot and brute forcing his brain on it until he comes up with a solution. I, on the other hand, can completely forget about an issue and then re-approach it with a clear head. I need that back and I cannot rely on weed to escape stress any longer. I cannot rely on weed to escape the responsibilities of my job, and I need to address those responsibilities if I am to improve.

Cutting weed out of my life will take discipline, but it will also help re-introduce discipline into other facets of my life. On a typical night, I’ll tell myself that it is late and I am low on sleep and that I need to sleep immediately. But then I’ll smoke on the roof, and all of the sudden it’s perfectly reasonable to program for a bit because it’s fun, and make myself some food because it’s delicious, and the next thing you know it’s 2am. I’ll wake up the next day with 5 hours of sleep, immediately reach for some coffee to correct for me being tired and go to work. If I can cut weed out of my life, I can cut caffeine out, too, but that will take even more discipline. I can’t smooth over fucking up my sleep schedule with a bit of caffeine. I can’t reach into my hat and pull out some extra energy in the afternoon when I am in a bit of a slump by drinking coffee, either. I’ll need to find my energy elsewhere and I am excited to explore alternative, more renewable energy sources in 2020. I might need to start working out more, perhaps by running because that’s the easiest to fit into my schedule. If my mind is racing at night when I am trying to fall asleep, I won’t be able to reach for weed to quiet my mind, either. I might need to reach for a book, or meditate, or go on a run. These are far healthier habits that will only pay dividends as I grow older.