howtoquitwell

Thank you for the kind words.

Honestly, having gone through recovery and grappling with all the shit I didn’t want to acknowledge has been a gift.

Learning to not hate myself for bad decisions I made in the past creates a lot of space to be compassionate and (hopefully) skillful in helping other people who are struggling. (Not to mention myself, when I fuck up…which is often.)

It can always be worse, and I’ve lived through enough “bad” to be grateful for how much easier mundane shit like taxes, politics, and argumentative kids are by comparison. :)

Happy to say I'm in a much better place now. Recovery was/is hard, but therapy, meditation, sleep, and exercise -- plus boring old antidepressants -- keep me on much more stable ground. Also family: I have kids now, and being there for them and my wife is a bigger source of motivation than taking care of myself a good portion of the time.

With regards to focus: I've struggled with that for my entire life, starting long before I ever took a drink or anything harder. Perhaps unsurprisingly, bipolar (which I 100% am) and ADHD (~95% sure; just not medicating for it b/c, y'know, "fun" drugs are a problem) are very common dual-diagnoses with substance disorders.

So it's not so much that the substance abuse made me less able to focus; it's more that I've _always_ struggled with slowing down and staying put. Alcohol and other downers were always a form of self-medication.

Fun story time:

Almost a decade ago now, I was a happy, high-functioning alcoholic. Winery tours, Scotch tastings, workplace drinks, etc.

It was all "fine" until I started struggling to get to sleep without a little "nudge"; then it was getting back to sleep in the wee hours; then it was every hour or two, 24x7.

Then I decided to go cold turkey while on vacation in Hawaii with my family, because who wants to be the drunk asshole in search of a cocktail while everyone else is having a good, sober time at the beach?

Boom: detox seizures, ER visit, and the ever-so-helpful prescription of Ativan so I wouldn't seize again. I was discharged with the instructions to "take as needed, up to every four hours." Since I was an addict in pain, I took that to mean, "take them every four hours, or maybe more often."

Cut forward 3-4 days, and the scrip ran out. Boom: more DTs, this time from the benzos.

It wasn't long after that when I went through my first inpatient psych visit b/c I was in no way equipped to handle withdrawals from two highly-addictive drugs at the same time.

Sadly it took another couple of years and another trip through the ER + inpatient care before I realized that doctors would and did prescribe me meds that were actively harmful in the interest of short-term comfort.

It's been six years since the last big episode and I'm genuinely grateful I only threatened myself with my shitty brain chemistry (however aggravated by poor medical intervention) rather than putting other people at risk. It could have been much worse if, say, I routinely drove people around or did any kind of safety-critical work.

Regardless: benzos are not "lightweight" drugs, and giving them to people with any kind of history of substance abuse disorders is a Bad Idea.

I'm working hard on this one. I'm down to a three-day week, and am largely keeping the boundaries around those other four.

It came about late last year when the current employer started going getting gently waved off in early funding pitches. That resulted in some thrash, forced marches to show we could ship, and the attendant burnout for me and a good chunk of the team I managed. I took a hard look at where the company was and where I was, and decided I didn't have another big grind in me right now.

Rather than just quit like I probably would have previously, I laid it out to our CEO in terms of what I needed: more time taking care of my family and myself, less pressure to deliver impossible things, and some broad idea of what I could say "no" to. Instead of laughing in my face, he dug in, and we had a frank conversation about what I _was_ willing to sign up for. That in turn resulted in a (slow, still work-in-progress) transition where we hired a new engineering leader and I moved into a customer-facing role with no direct reports.

Now I to work a part-time schedule, so I can do random "unproductive" things like repair the dishwasher, chaperone the kid's field trip, or spend the afternoon helping my retired dad make a Costco run. I can reasonably stop and say, "I _could_ pay someone to do that for me, but I actually have time this week and I can just get it done" and sometimes I...actually do, which is kind of amazing?

...and it's still fucking hard to watch the big, interesting decisions and projects flow by with other people tackling them and not jump in and offer to help. B/c no matter what a dopamine ride that path can be, it also leads to late nights and weekends working and traveling and feeling shitty about being an absentee parent and partner.

Procedures and policies, yet. Rights, not so much, at least beyond those disclosures and documents they are legally required to share.

As an example: it is a legally-protected right in many jurisdictions for employees to share compensation information with each other, or even externally. Many (most?) employers strongly discourage this practice, however, and will usually omit the notice that there are legal restrictions on their response in case employees choose to do so. Ditto labor organizing, many types of guaranteed leave, and most whistleblowing protections.

The information asymmetry between most large employers and their employees w.r.t. legal rights is large, and the company's incentives are almost never aligned towards voluntary disclosure.

The precariousness the author describes is real, at least in my experience. I'm 20 years into a career that many would find enviable except strangely devoid of any tenures longer than about 30 months, because that's the longest I've been able to surf my bipolar swings before imploding. Those meltdowns traditionally resulted in me running away from work to fall into a boozy depressive mess for six months, them returning once the mania kicked in again.

This year, a low coincided with the onset of COVID lockdown and I put myself in the hospital. Not checked myself in: I tried to hurt myself badly enough to be in the ER, ICU, and then inpatient psych care.

Even there, I was the "eloquent, self-reflective" model patient, much like I've been (in the manic times) the persuasive, thoughtful, creative employee that people couldn't wait to hire and promote.

After a couple of months of medical leave I went back to my previous job instead of quitting. It was driven largely by financial insecurity, as I had burned through my savings after not working at all in 2019...once again, due to being in a low phase _and_ getting sober and having no bandwidth left for anything else.

Being back to work at a place that has seen me swing from "A+ performer, definite strong leadership/promotion track, etc." to "can I keep a job, any job here? Ideally one that won't demand more than 40 hours a week of my time?" is far harder than jumping into an impossible workload while manic. Grinding out yet another week full of stand-ups and PRs when I have zero confidence is gut-wrenching, and on top of it all I have to be there and stable and not a depressive mess for my family, because I can't let them take care of me while the world outside is on fire.

All I want to do is get on my bike and ride for six hours a day, then cook dinner for my family, then do a little programming and writing before I go to bed. Literally, that's it.

Unfortunately, that's not a lifestyle I can sustain, even if I suspect it might be the thing that would keep me alive past 40. So it's back to work, taking my meds every day, and lying through my teeth when folks ask how I'm doing.