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I am investigating some flaws of mine, that I've expanded upon previously.
I have a fear of failure and of being unproductive that is undermining me. I don't like it, so I am digging at it. I am investigating this issue through different lenses. The one in focus today is: why do I tend to feel happy when I work? And to the contrary, what happens when I am miserable at work? My work is, unsurprisingly perhaps, engineering related. I've been doing this for close to ten years.
Let's start by characterising how the good case usually feels. First, there is apprehension, like entering cold water. Then, the feeling of responsibility pushes me over the edge fully into it. Usually, starting means assessing the problem at hand. Why is it relevant? What has been tried? Is it similar to something I've seen? How can I insulate the problem from the rest of the world? What do these boundaries look like? Then already, the apprehension dissolves. I enter something like flow, that feels like hunting a solution in some undergrowth more than doing something engineering-like. There something primal to it that is hard to describe.
Once the problem is understood well enough, a branching appears. There is rarely just one path to the solution, and sometimes, these paths are downright opposites. But one must be chosen first, based on gut-feeling typically, not reason. A deeper state of being then starts which feels a bit like a dance. Following the first chosen road, more information on the situation is naturally gathered. As progress is made, the brain keeps track on what I can only describe as the veracity-score of the other paths at the same time. It feels like a smell. When one path smells better than the other one, the worldview is switched, that path's hypotheses are slotted in memory and we walk now on that different path. Sometime only a couple steps further, until the switch happens again. Back and forth, back and forth, as more and more information is gathered and new branching appears, multiplying the paths to keep track of. When the going is good and the problem complex, that switching can happen every couple seconds. Until a group of paths smell much better than all the rest, collapsing all paths to a handful, then only one. Then we arrive at a solution. Knowing that it is only one path among many that we found in the forest. But the one with best evidence so far, with a reasoning that can be traced in inverse.
That part feels really great. I don't exist anymore. I am just an entity dedicated to solving the issue. I snarl when a path is a dead end and rejoice when I find a way past it. If someone interacts with me IRL, I react like a cat seeing a cucumber, as it bring me back in a space I forget I exist in. It is one of my preferred state of being. I nearly live for that.
I am lucky and privileged to have a job whose duty is non repetitive by nature, does not destroy my flesh and bones, does not involve dangerous materials, etc... There is one way, however, where it is toxic and lead me to bad places previously health wise. It is when you do not find the path through the forest. It's alright one day, some problems are tough. Rarely, problems are severely complex and mean weeks of reflection (typically not worked on full-time). Some problems are special, with no documentation, support, organisational chaos, unclear objectives and sometimes all of that at the same time. I can deal with the frustration of no meaningful progress for a while and just keep digging and digging in search of a way forward. But I tend to start breaking at the 3 months mark, when I feel progress is not tangible enough. I am so lost by that point that I don't always notice how bad I feel. Going in the metaphorical forest and coming back empty handed day after day depresses me. Makes me doubt who I am. The problem is that this forest I go in only exists in my mind. I do document all the logic I can in notebooks and such. But until the solution is found, there is nothing concrete that changes.
I was raised with a culture of results. Efforts are morally significant, but do not substitute for achieving the goal where I come from. And because I am a scaredy cat, I tend to pick fights I could win. Where I could guarantee a result, or nearly, before I even started the task. When a risk was taken, there was at least a plan A, B and C. Therefore not achieving the goal tends to break me, because it means so many things went wrong. All my plans turning belly-side up, not finding a way to pivot in a sensible way and failing, plain and simple, did happen a couple times naturally. Probably too rarely, given how much it hurts. The situations had something in common: the initial problem involved uncontrollable external factors. Also known as: real life. Typically, these problems contained significant dependencies that did not pan out. It sucks massively to need something, not get it and not be clever enough to find a substitute for it. In retrospect, it would have been smarter in such cases to give up and redirect my energy to a different problem. But because I define myself as someone who solves problem, admitting that I can't solve a problem is an existential crisis. I should have gone and laid out the full picture to my hierarchy, explained why progress is difficult and whether they wanted me to continue or do something else. And confess, when I don't see no paths any more, that I need help. It's what I would consider professionally sensible in others anyway. I try to function like this now, but still very, very late. Most of all, I need to prioritise the monkey behind the problem solving machine, otherwise the machine will break when the monkey does. And then the monkey won't get to play at being the machine no more.
Rereading all this, what a fragile ego I have. If only knowing this for a fact could be enough make my brain tick differently. Digging into that feeling did help me get a couple things straight though:
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