I am suffering from a work related stress disorder.

And a personality based stress disorder. By which I mean: I am generally anxious and driven and have trouble letting things go.

But today has brought relief. I sit in my home office on a Friday at four PM and for the first time in what seems like, literally, years, I feel like I have nothing to do and yet i still have a bit of energy.

I cannot remember the last time. I cannot. I try to recall a similar experience and it escapes me. I have this small window of time where things are fine and I don't have anything in particular to do and the normally crushing weight of life responsibilities has receded if only for a short period.

I put on an album, an old one, Tool's Undertow, from 1992, when I had turned fifteen and my brain was first coming online.

And I remember the possibility of life that I felt back then. I was stressed and anxious as a teen too - core personality traits don't change much as one ages – but through the haze of my cloudy internal world, I was able to see hope on the horizon – that in the future, things would get better. The anxiety would get better. Dreams might be fulfilled.

Listening to Undertow thirty odd years ago, I remember just enjoying the music and how weird the band was. I didn't think about what they earned, or who they were as people. I didn't wonder whether or not I'd like them or they'd like me.

I was able to enjoy the experience of simply listening to the songs they'd created. Over and over again.

The three things I thought I could possibly become as an adult were: musician, writer, teacher.

Instead I became a computer programmer and infrastructure analyst.

This career has been lucrative but crushing.

I gave myself the entire album to write. Before my wife gets home I will have to shower. Against my better judgement, I drank half a bottle of wine in a span of thirty minutes to celebrate a good week. It has left me feeling better than I've felt in months.

If you include thoughts spent thinking about work, I worked most of the fucking time this week. I thought about how to fix issues A B and C at work, directly related to the project I just delivered. I work in a zero-tolerance for failure position. The stuff I do and create needs to be available 100% of the time and satisfy 100% of edge cases. It is single-sign-on crap, identity management, user profile-portal type shit. It is insufferable. I suffer when I work.

There it is. Let me say it again. I suffer when I work.

I hear people say this: Do what you love and work isn't suffering.

This might be true. But if work isn't suffering, then life might be a process in emotional descension in the larger view. You may not make enough money to be stable. You may fear how to make ends meet month-to-month. You may worry about the future.

You also hear people say this. I have said it myself in the past, and I still consider it to be true. Give your career a chance. Let yourself get lost in the details. You may find that it becomes more interesting as you learn more about it. As you understand more about it and obtain greater ownership and stake in it as the years pass.

This is certainly true. If you told my fifteen year old self that he'd become me – the workaholic asshat that I am – in thirty or thirty five years, I cannot imagine him being thrilled about it. That fifteen year old would have been drinking and smoking and going to school and trying to get A's and wondering why women wouldn't look at him. He would not have thought that analyzing software workflows would be anywhere remotely fulfilling. He would wonder why I (he) didn't try harder to find a better path.

I did try. I tried for a long time, even while carrying a full time job. I journaled. I explored life through relationships and travel. I took guitar lessons for years. I learned how to draw, how to cook, how to take care of myself as an adult.

But after a while I started to feel like no matter what I do outside of work, work is the central thing. It takes up the most time. 48 out of 52 weeks a year if you're lucky, 50/52 if you are not because your employer is stingy with the vacation time.

After enough years of this in a row, you become habituated to it. You realize there is no escape.

After a longer while you realize there will never be an escape.

After thirty years, which is about how long I've been performing this act of software theater called "my job," you might realize you're not sure you need or want there to be an escape. You think: Escape is impossible. No. I must cope. I must hang on.

I must suffer.

Suffering is survival. If I'm not suffering, I must be dead.

These are the lessons I have internalized somewhere inside myself.

Part of what is happening right now is dramatic decompression. For the last year I have been submerged in the worst project of my career. I will not go into details. Details are in previous journal entries. I hate complaining about it but it is also hard to not complain about something that has consumed so much of your waking time for a year straight.

I am on the other side now. I am on the offensive. I am throwing my nemesis Alpo under the bus. I traced an awful cross-site security issue (resulting in sign on failing for our library system) to changes Alpo made, which means he has to fix them. I detailed the trace in a bug report and alerted my manager.

Alpo needs to fix this on his end. Make him read the bug report twice before reaching out to me again. His last update was AI generated and did not show any path forward whatsoever, not even a murky one. I'm done with investigating on my end, he needs to evaluate and suggest a solution on the code base he owns. If I try to work around the issue in my code base, it will take a month. The solution on his end will be a few lines of code and could be delivered in a day.

The real issue is that I work in a zero-failure environment. We do not tolerate any issues. Which means that everything I do needs to be perfect. I am not making this up. I have been told this directly by my manager, more than once.

In addition, when the work that other people do isn't perfect and creates problems, I am essentially the consultant drawn into the fray to identify the issue and course of action.

I am an always on employee and consultant in an environment that will not tolerate any issues whatso-fucking-ever. I didn't choose this and I certainly don't want it. Teenage me liked imperfection. Imperfection is what makes things interesting.

what you want and what you need - don't mean that much to me, Maynard screams from my speakers.

I wish I could feel this way. I wish I could not worry so much about the problems, but if there is a single issue assigned to me affecting a single user, I cannot relax. My core internal programming no longer allows it, from years of workplace conditioning.

This week I have solved every production user-facing issue except the one that Alpo now owns.

And as a result I feel strange. It is a lifting.

It is a reduction of weight in my head that I have not felt since taking on this project.

Where I am right now: On the up.

I haven't exactly broken up with my job, but the weight of the relationship has lifted.

All of my issues – all of them – every single last fucking thing – related to the project deliverables, have been resolved.

What this means is that I no longer have to fall asleep at night thinking about how to resolve a particular problem that involves seven tiers of workflow and results in a user error accessing a service.

And I am realizing: Maybe I can fall asleep thinking about other things.

maybe i can think about writing again.

maybe i can think about emailing Cal again, I haven't spoken to him since... Since the wedding? 2002?

No, wait. We did have dinner in Portland in 2023.

But since – we emailed some in 2024 – we almost saw a Massive Attack concert together. And then nothing.

He's in France and sometimes Maine. I'm in a suburb of Boston. We are apart.

There are text threads. With old college friends attached: Boyar. Dean,

But we're not talking. Cal is waiting for me. For me to reach out.
For me to rediscover writing. For me to live for something other than work.

I wonder sometimes if Cal really thinks as much about me as I do about him.

Here is what I want to do:

Enforce boundaries at work I have created.

Give work less space in my head.

Have a life worth living outside of it.

Have a foundation of meaning that is mine and not just my wife's or work's.

My wife Penny is a critical part of the map of meaning in my head but one cornerstone cannot hold up the shack of my life.

The only way to accomplish any of this is to not allow work to continue to crush me. It has crushed me enough. I am thoroughly sick of it.

My employer and teammates do not care about me. I am certain. I have been told that certainty of this nature in an individual is unsexy and unappealing in others. But sometimes unappealing thoughts are true.

Here is some evidence.

I had a meeting with my director last week. I will call him Brian Bernier although that is definitely not his real name. I told him that the project that I delivered had a high personal cost.

He acknowledged my comments without providing either sympathy or a realistic path forward.

I told him I worked 60 hours a week for a year straight. More if you count the amount of time I spent thinking about the project without being officially seated at a workstation creating or fixing code. I could not take time off because of the inflexible deadline. My health declined.

He asked why I had to work so much. Why could I not offload it to others?

I thought of Samwise Gamgee in Lord of the Rings, asking to take the Ring from Frodo.

Samwise, noticing for the millionth time, Frodo's distress, says: I could SHARE THE LOAD.

I wanted to climb on his back. I wanted to find someone who could carry me to the top of Mount Doom.

But nobody could. I work with people who do not understand what I was doing with regard to automation, CICD, jenkins jobs, yaml, tomcat and IDP stack, infrastructure objective, cross-site routing, and so on and so forth, this paragraph could be 50x this length with the number of things my co-workers do not understand – I am 50 and they are around 30 – I have worked at large software companies and financial institutions, while they have worked here, at my place, for 2-3 years.

Which would mean to get anyone to help me I would first need to get them up to speed with all of these details – thus slowing down my velocity on this nonnegotiable date of project delivery that must be met or else – and even if I did, their efficacy would be questionable – they are not devoted or OCD like I am.

I would have cross trained them had I been given any time at all to do so but with the hard deadlines, I couldn't manage to crosstrain while hitting the project deliverables on time. I use my depression and anxiety to fuel my drive at work and in other areas of life. My younger co-workers don't have the mental baggage I have. Here is what I mean: Because of my makeup, I am able to sublimate my despair into problem solving, because it feels better to solve problems than it does to look at myself.

They watch Netflix and talk about Squidgame to start meetings while I am entering resolution details to a bug I dreamt about the night before. I don't blame them for not wanting to become me. I didn't want to become me either.

Which meant to me in the moment – in every moment of the past 9 or 10 or 12 months working on this project – that I was essentially on my own.

There was no load sharing.

So Brian acknowledged the hardship but did not provide any solutions moving forward. I hinted that I also would not work for Alpo and I think that point landed. If nothing else came out of the meeting, this was a useful result, because I feel pretty strongly that they want to promote Alpo and if that happens, they will try to get me to report to him. As my manager, I believe Alpo would utterly annihilate me. He is domineering, reminding me of an old manager Neil from a financial company I worked with in the mid-aughts. It would be suicide inducing. I would be forced to either try to move to another team, and if that didn't work out, quit. It is a textbook Untenable Situation. I will simply not do it.

So if I got that single point across, the meeting was worth having.

But the rest of it – well. I did not get a satisfactory response. He just didn't care about my workload.

So it falls to me to care about my workload.

It falls to me to create walls, boundaries, push back.

Ideally I'll then have a bit more headspace to work on creating the other two cornerstones of my life, which are currently submerged in the quick.

Undertow's finished. It's time to take the dog out, make dinner, decompress, if that's at all possible anymore.

I'm still somehow hopeful that it is.