Blogging a Dead Horse — And getting back on it
Towards the end of 2022 I took a sabbatical at work which had a massive impact in my life. By the end of it I had a new job, a ADHD diagnosis and a resolution to change my relationship with work and the many side hustles I had.
The new job saw me moving from being a senior dev at a large software consultancy to doing a 50/50 split of engineering management and senior dev at a small startup, a step up from my previous position.
The ADHD diagnosis left me unsure of myself, in the most literal sense. It knocked me for six, questioning what parts of my personality were linked to the way my brain works and what was ‘me’.
The change in how I hustled came about after I found myself with 4 months of being free to do what I wanted to do and realising that ultimately working myself to death wasn’t really helping me out mentally. It was giving me a lot of positive feedback but it wasn’t providing me with what I wanted — money, so I decided to stop in favour of giving myself free time to enjoy other parts of my life.
Where I stand a year and half later
I find myself in a different place now. I’ve been on ADHD medication for over a year now, I’ve shed the engineering management side of my role at work and I’m bored of exploring tech only through my day job.
The ADHD meds have got me more focused, I no longer get distracted by my own thoughts as they paint a picture of the fun stuff that I could be doing instead of the stuff I should be doing.
The thing is though, when your brain isn’t keeping you occupied with crazy plots and side quests you start to see things that you would otherwise be too distracted to notice.
In the past this would have fuelled a deep anger in me and I would have used that anger to power a deep dive into something that would act to remove the risk of the thing, however with my resolution of trying to not overwork myself I instead felt powerless and just had to accept that’s how the world worked.
As much as the burn out from side-hustles messed up my mental health the flip side was that I learned a lot of new things, I had published a lot of stuff and I had tried to make a difference to the situation I found myself in.
I think the anger has come back, and I welcome it.
Channelling that anger
Before the ADHD diagnosis I was angry but I wasn’t properly focused. I would have 10 different things on the go at once and if I’m honest it’s amazing that I got as much done as I did. I think this is put down to having enough passion for an issue that I actually put the time in to solve the problem I saw.
Through the medication I now have the means to stick with things that I don’t necessarily have a passion for but commit to doing. Sometimes this is still a struggle but the medication at least makes it a little easier to get started on things.
One thing that has become apparent to me since I’ve stopped blogging is that without a channel to document what I’ve been doing and express my opinions on, I forget a lot of what I’ve done and how I feel about it.
With this in mind the first step I’ll be taking is to create some form of knowledge management system to help me organise and record my thoughts on things and then use this as the basis for what I’ll be writing on.
I’m going to commit to a weekly blog again, it was a good enough cadence for me to experience something and experience it for long enough to form an opinion on it that meant I could write about it. I’m also going to hold myself to account for keeping that up in order to break out of the spiral of allowance I’ve found myself in.
I’m also going to make more use of my personal website and turn it from a simple back-up of posts to a means of wrapping up collections of posts in contextual information that make a more compelling story.
Good for you, what does that mean for me though?
For you, dear reader, this should mean that I pop up in your inbox every week with some form of post about how I learned a new thing, the pros and cons of learning that thing and hopefully once you read it you’ll be compelled to try it out yourself.
