I’m in a historical building in downtown Budapest with a refurbished up-and-coming communal workspace for mostly tech companies. Small rooms for small companies with access to big meeting rooms, enormous kitchens, a playroom and a space for hosting events. Glass doors, wooden aesthetic, sound-proof phone booths. This space looks familiar but I feel so out of place. It’s been months since I put my foot in a similar place after I resigned from my software engineering job due to burnout.
I walk down the outside corridor and take in the view of the restaurant in the middle of the building. Here you can eat your lunch in the midst of a literal jungle with huge monsteras, all types of philodendrons and areca palms. Soft music is coming up from there and you can smell the delicious combination of spices, meat and pasta. I find the office my friend is in and I knock on the door. She gets up from her chair with a huge smile on her face to greet me. She shows me around the place, introduces me to its nooks and crannies while telling me how great it is to work here. She goes on and on and I notice resistance slowly building up in my body. That all too familiar knot in my chest and stomach, pulling me away from the present. A turned down version of how I felt in my body when I was in the midst of burnout. And I just knew right then and there that I’m done with coding.
I left my last job in a hurry. My Hashimoto’s was flaring up, I had severe anxiety, I was extremely tired all the time and I could not function properly. It was hard enough to manage my personal life with tinies at home, I had no energy left to do something that sucked the life out of me. At this point, I did not know whether I wanted to leave my career for good or it was just a temporary phase until I got my shit together.
I came up with possible alternatives right away though. What if the work environment was different? What if I worked at a really small company? I could have more impact if the headcount would be like 20, right? What if I worked with friends? What if I worked at a company whose vision is aligned with my purpose? What if I switched from backend to frontend? What if I quit C++ and worked with C#? I was searching for the small change I could make to put a tiny hello kitty bandage on my enormous demotivation wound. I was ruminating on this even though I had zero desire for months to pull up an editor and write some code. No pet project idea emerged either. Not of a software type at least. Being there with my friend in that beautiful and cosy environment, listening to her stories, my body was not just telling me, but yelling me NO. The body whose signals I ignored most of my life and after burnout, it was not a question whether I should listen to her or not. I simply had to if I wanted to function.
It was not easy to let go of an identity I clung onto for years. That’s why it took me a long time to finally let go of it. I loved being a woman in the industry. I loved showing the world a woman could do this when most think it’s a man’s job. I loved the look on people’s faces whenever I told them I was a software engineer. Even though being a woman made me lonely in a masculine environment day-to-day, those rare interactions made me unique. And back then, I thought that I had to be unique, that I had to stand out. When I made my decision to switch my career to programming back in 2016, I looked at coding from the outside and said, hey, this sounds nice. I could work from home, I could have a nice salary, I could be valued for my work because there was a shortage of us when I started out, and there would be nice perks as well. Free food, books, courses I could attend, and flying out to a conference somewhere sounded nice. I tried them all but they did not bring me joy. Programming books took the fun out of reading, I never ever finished a programming course I started and attending a Women in Tech conference in Amsterdam was a lonely experience. And my eating habits restricted by my Hashimoto disease and insulin issues does not pair well with regular IT foods, like scones, pizza and beer.
I also thought of myself as a loner who likes to spend her life in front of a screen and happily avoids human contact. I love spending time alone, true, but I did not realise that I love to connect to others, too. In my experience, the only way I could connect through code was when someone found a bug in something I wrote or when someone worked on a piece of code I had written and said I did a nice job or told me how it could be improved. Those were extremely rare occasions. Writing code was an isolating experience for me. I was bored when I did it and I was disconnected in the long run. In contrast, when I write I get to connect with myself which is already amazing and if someone reads it that’s just fucking exhilarating.
The other issue was that I wasn’t a quitter. I was a high achiever and I was not afraid of some temporary discomfort. Even though that discomfort went on for years. Like I was a frog in water where the temperature was slowly rising. I did not care how much coding depleted my energy, I previously decided that it was a good thing. I must add that it was amazing to earn a good salary and have financial security due to my career. Every month, a big portion of my salary stayed in my bank account. This is literally a life-saver now. I don’t want to downplay this aspect, nor the general niceness I got from companies I worked at. Especially at my last job. I felt like a human being who could fail, learn, and have a life outside of work that was equally valued as my work life. Especially after I got pregnant and later on went back to work as a mom. I am immensely grateful for all of this.
The breaking point
Last spring, I did the Artist's Way for the first time (I’m in the midst of my second time and I will write about my experience later on). I rediscovered lost parts of myself, I got into the habit of engaging with my thoughts through journaling, and they became less and less irritable background noise and more like insight into my authentic self. I started to see some signs that were there for a long time but I missed them before. At this point, I was sleeping very poorly due to my twin toddlers’ night wakings and I was home with them a lot because every other week they got infected by lovely virus from nursery. I also had a task I hated and could not summon up willpower to do it anymore. I worked on this single task for three months and I never actually finished it. And from a random day onward, just like that, I began to start my working days with a crying session and my balanced procrastination turned into a severe one. While I worked, I checked my messages or instagram like every 5-10 minutes. Super healthy, I know but that was the only way I could make it through.
And one day, I had a tiny extra task and it was on a deadline. I was at home with my kids for another fun illness. The product manager on our team let me know that the task was prepared properly to do and I undertook to do it in the evening when the kids were asleep. This task was like a 15-minutes one, tops. But as soon as I opened Visual Studio, I got super anxious, I had nausa and my cortisol levels went over the roof. I was like, no. I can’t do this to myself and my family. And from there on, I was looking for ways to get out. And I eventually did. Like I had any other choice, really. First I went on sick leave then I decided to resign. I did not heal miraculously after these, though. I vividly remember when I was already on sick leave and I was crying for an hour, my back supported by the cold white wall, my bare feet touching the cold tiled floor of our kitchen, my husband sitting next to me and hugging me with his headset on, listening to his colleagues chatting and me sobbing my heart out. But after I decided to resign, things slowly started to get better day by day.
I have to say that my burnout saved my life. Since then I have healed more than ever in my life, I formed new habits, I am generally way nicer to myself and to others and I appreciate and love life more. I’m not healed or doing things the new way all the time either but I slowly learn to accept those dark moments, days, weeks, too. And maybe it just turns out that I wasn’t into writing code. I was into writing.💚