These past two weeks have been really draining. I’ve made it through another week, but good grief I don’t know at what cost. I know one thing for sure: my utilization is going to easily be over 100% this quarter. I can’t even say that I’m all that upset about the work. It’s been rewarding in a way to see data syncing between two systems all from my own design. What’s more, I’ve been the only developer on this part of the project. Am I exhausted? Absolutely. Will I be happy when this is done? Yes. Would I change anything if I had to do this again? For sure. I bet you were expecting a different question or answer at the end there. Well, I’m sitting here in bed with only a few brain cells remaining and I’m using them to write this journal. We’re going to get what we get out of this journal entry.
The story starts when my partner and I were on our way to the grocery store this morning. It was the morning, so my partner drove as my medicine was still kicking in and I don’t like to be behind a motor vehicle without a good portion of my ADHD medicine doing its thing. My mind often wanders to various topics if I’m not having to focus on driving, and lately big topics have been this journal/website and work. Things were good until it struck me that the thing I’ve been working on for week and weeks isn’t going to work. I tried to stuff the thought down so that I could worry about it later, but we both know that it didn’t work. If it did, I probably wouldn’t have a topic to journal about this evening. I felt my anxiety spike faster than it has in a while. It hit me so hard that I was physically starting to feel sick.
I was quietly panicking on the inside. I didn’t want to let my partner know because it wasn’t something I wanted to bother her with. Plus, I wasn’t interesting in admitting to someone, even my partner, that I am a failure. We weren’t even two miles from the house when I told her I was feeling sick. My stomach was in knots because of the panic and stress I was feeling. My brain was running through scenarios of how to escape this problem. My partner, being the amazing person that she is, asked if we needed to turn around. So we did, and she dropped me back off at home.
I immediately went into the bedroom and flopped on the bed. I don’t really know how long it was, but it felt like about 5 minutes later, I had an idea about how to solve the issue and I started searching online to see if my idea was supported by any official documentation. I needed to figure out if this was a real thing I could do with the platform or if I was just imagining it. Prior to this, though, I was actually feeling fear over how bad this might end up being. My mind was spinning and I was spiraling. I think the only hope I had of pulling up out of the spiral was realizing that I wasn’t doomed.
The whole timeline is a bit fuzzy, but I my partner came in either before or after I had an idea of what to do. I want to say it was before. I admitted to her that I think I screwed up and made a bit mistake on the design of the system. She suggested that I should talk to my manager about it. If you don’t know about how incredible my boss is, and you probably don’t, let me tell you. This man has so much empathy of anyone I’ve worked for and knows how to drive his team with praise and encouragement in the most green flag ways. It was still scary to think about bringing it up because I didn’t want anyone to see me like this. I sent a slack message to him and the solution architect saying that I really needed some help with this. It must have been no later than 8 am when my boss called me on slack (it was 5 am for him on the west coast) to offer some help.
Fast forward an hour and I realized that my idea would work, but holy moly was there a lot of work to do to re-implement things. The core of the system would remain unchanged and the vast majority of the integration itself could stay unchanged, thankfully. The two things that did need to change were how I handled the field mapping and the triggering points of the sync. Even after a long 10 hours of working at it, I’m still refining the triggering mechanisms as there are some quirks that I needed to work around. The integration had some code updates to handle some new logic, but the results are promising. These were some wild trials that I went through to get here, though. A little bit at a time, I could start to see some light through the end of the tunnel.
On one hand, I’m still beating myself up for not realizing the flaw in my design sooner. And if you are interested, it has to do with the order in which a hierarchy or related records in a database are migrated. On the other hand, I’m sort of proud of myself for being able to pull myself out of the spiral the way I did. I don’t think it was due to any amazing coping mechanisms or psychological mastery on my end. I think it was more out of necessity. However, and this is a big point, I didn’t just collapse under it all like I would have a decade or more ago. I went through a similar thing in my freshman year of college with a big end of the year essay. That had a lot of other things going on with it: mainly depression playing a big role. Even taking that into consideration, I think I’ve handled this well.
And I didn’t have to do this one my own. It’s hard to ask for help, especially when it means admitting a fault. I didn’t even want to tell my own partner, that’s how in my own head I was about all this. Ultimately, I’m glad I told her and I’m glad I told my boss and gave an honest status update in the morning call. I think I may have taken a year or two of the project manager’s life, but I did leave him with some good news before the end of the work day, so maybe that helped balance things out.
It’s been a really long couple of weeks. I don’t want to think about how much harder it would have been without a supportive partner or a boss that cares about his team’s mental health as much as he does. I’ve made it through another week, and now it is time to try relaxing before going on Monday.
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