How I got obsessed with my work and forgot that I was worthy of lots of love

My journey into software was chaos. After a near perfect 18 months or so of coding in which the only real challenge was the somewhat rather inaccessible bootcamp that I did I got laid off suddenly. Then I came to a new job and I am not going to say anything more other than the environment wasn’t a match and there was a slight mismatch in levels and expectations 

And because my work is meaningful to me and I love it I wasn’t going to let it go. And so in a year of that role (I was never meant to be a backend engineer anyway) and then moving over to Frontend I forgot

I forgot that crying over your work wasn’t normal

I forgot that if I was sitting on the sofa in my office having a panic attack

That the priority wasn’t my code 

It was me. Many weeks ago my mentor gave me a massive lecture at work saying that it was never worth getting as worked up as I was at that point and that I was always to ask for help or to hand over the work to someone before it got to that point

I was surprised not because of her lecture but because this was a fraction of how overwhelmed I had been during my whole time in backend and I was being told I shouldn’t feel that way at work 

And so this is the real purpose of this blogpost

Which is to say

I want to go back to every time I cried at my desk or had a panic attack on the sofa at work I want to go to every time I panicked and felt alone

I want to go to every time I cried over git and tell myself

That I am beautiful and that this is not worth it

That my code is not worth crying over

That yes of course I love my work and I do meaningful work

And that I deserve to be here without overworking without crying without breaking myself over my work

I want to go back to summer 2024 where I was in the office til dark every night and rip myself out of the office and into the summer that I missed 

The Christmas break that I spent learning debugging I want to smash those books and go and spend some time with my family

Every time I felt small or worthless or like I didn’t deserve my job

Fuck it

I am brilliant I am beautiful and I am extremely hard working

I really deserve my job

I spent so many years working hard for it

My wellbeing matters so much more than the output of my code

I deserve to go home every day holding my head high and feeling proud of myself and the incredible work that I have done 

Thank you 

Have I used this beautiful photo from Harrogate on this blog yet? Not sure