Written a little while ago

This is my first day as an ex-employee of Apple. I still feel a strange mix of fear, elation, hope, and dread. I think this transition needed to happen at least six months ago, but I was too stubborn to let it.

I spent far too much of my work time, too many of the corporation's hours, lost in a fog inside my own head, searching for my enthusiasm in a hollowed out space. In retrospect the days all smear together into one endless afternoon, sitting in an office filled with cold indirect sunlight, exhausted and sick from the shuttle ride, staring through a computer screen. My mind needed to be in one single shape - the shape for writing code - but it was writhing around inside my skull, desperate to think of other things.

Now my life contains a feeling of freedom that I am still only barely able to grasp. I could do anything. And I have so much time, finally, finally, to explore with.

What am I going to do? I can live for a very long time with the savings I've accumulated, if i'm careful. Will I go back to college and get a teaching credential and a Science degree? Will I start a small business leading bike tours? Become a tutor? Get a part-time gig raking leaves just for the exercise?

Will I do the grand thing I was pining for all those days in the purgatory of my office, and ride my bicycle around the whole damn world? Will I just sit in the sun, in my back yard, with the cat rollin' around in the gravel, reading book after book, for a month? I remember reading for pleasure ... that seems like such a gigantic indulgence now...

Oh the things I could do...! I need ideas, I need conversations, I need anything that isn't Perl and Python and SQL and finicky stylesheet manipulations.

Written less than a little while ago

The vending machine in the break room, back where I used to work until recently, is full of unhealthy snacks in neon packaging. Items that would cost a dollar or more to the outside world cost 25 cents to employees.

I have probably eaten a hundred bags of chips purchased from that vending machine. Now, sitting on the desk in my house, is the last bag I will ever fetch from it. I clearly remember being hungry and nervous, day after day, and roving to that machine with the change in my wallet, buying a quick fix. I remember taking the bags home, as I have done with this one, and cramming them down my throat as I reclined in the bathtub, my mind laying flat against the glass edge of the fishbowl I was drifting in, as close as possible to the relaxation that I sought but could not actually reach.

Now I look at this one remaining bag and my stomach rejects it. Divest of that crushing corporate weight, I feel an urge to rid myself of every bad habit, every malformed coping strategy, every stupid wasteful empty activity I physically or mentally wallowed in as I struggled wretchedly to cope with deep, systemic illness.

Today I repaired my iPod and worked on retrofitting my bicycle, enjoying the afternoon sunlight in the back yard while the cat stood watch. I continued to sort through the steaming pile of data crap that I scraped out of my work machine when I bailed from the office. I organized my tools. I arranged a massive library of all the audiobooks, books, and poetry I downloaded over the last two years but had no time to explore.

This is going to be a strange, interesting period for me.

Did you ever see that old Snoopy cartoon - Snoopy Come Home I think - where he and Woodstock go hiking across the countryside? Woodstock travels part of the way by building a tiny, adorable sailboat and drifting up a river. Every now and then, with soft guitar music playing in the background, the wind would change, and blow Woodstock towards a sandbar or back in the wrong direction. Woodstock would untie his sail, wave it around spastically for a moment, and then pull it taut in a slightly different orientation, and magically he would be sailing forward again. Sometimes he had to shake the sail over and over when the wind was being difficult, but he always found a way to catch the wind forward.

This is what it feels like now. I have changed out so many things from my life in the last year, that now I'm getting down to a single row of planks and a single patch of sail. Now life is very simple. I'm shaking the line again, to fill my little sail, and catching the way forward on the wind.

Written recently

I can feel it there, surging up just behind my awareness in the present moment, like a monster behind my back. A black plume of anxiety. It rises up and suddenly I am back in a world of flickering machine lights and pages of unfinished code. "I'm falling behind, I know it. I should not be relaxing like this. I should be writing that code. I should be fixing the system."

It's a poisonous thing, feeling ashamed to relax.

My job didn't start that way. There was a time when I could drive home from the office and cast it fully out of my mind. My weekends were my own, and I felt confident that my rest was well earned because I had plowed through difficult logic and thorny design issues, and even though no one had milestones and deadlines hanging over my head, even though there wasn't a set itinerary, the system leapt forward, getting faster and smarter and easier to use every day under my care. I was passionate about it, more than any work I had ever done.

Even as time wore on, as my circumstances changed, as my life disassembled itself further and further so I could have fewer distractions, eventually when my support system was poisoned and my physical health began to crumble, even then, I could see the way forward for the system. I knew how to hash out the design, how to implement every idea, and if I didn't I knew who to defer to for guidance.

But being a corporate man is only something you can do when the rest of your life is working to your satisfaction, because you cannot pay full attention to it, even when you need to. The company demands the finest hours of your time and the lion's share of your brain, and unless your management is uncommonly wise, they will give you all the rope you need - and then even more - and watch in mild frustration as you hang yourself from the coathook in your office. You're not supposed to work yourself to death; it just happens.

At first, I was protected by a brilliant and well-matched manager. Then, I was protected by my own common sense and my support system. After the first three years, my memory of the outside world - which had been sustaining me in a way I didn't realize - had faded away to almost nothing. A vague dream beyond the walls of my house, my car, and my office. The outside world became something I read about online. Sure, I walked in it, but I did so with a head full of code. For me, there was only the work, and the desperate holiday excursions that I carefully designed to yank me out of my office environment with maximum force so I could plunge back into it again just as forcefully.

Then, my life went sideways, my mind went elsewhere, and the rope began to unspool.

I know I'm past all that now. Despite my stubbornness, I am outside, in the real world again. I don't have to think about the system, or the lab, or the office, any more. That office door is closed and the key that's still on my keyring no longer unlocks it. I can just throw that key away. But then ... Something triggers a memory ... And the black plume comes roiling up my spine, and for an infuriating instant, I am back inside that cold room, hanging from the coathook, choking and tearing at the rope. "You're falling behind. You're failing to cope. You're not worthy of this position. Impostor!"

I want this ridiculous anxiety out of my head; I need to drive it back out. It wasn't here before and I won't be tolerating it now. It is literally no longer my job to lead the coding charge for automated testing of an entire software ecosystem. That was not something I did to stay alive, it was something I did for money. The job ended, and I remain. I can just take all that responsibility - and all that worry - and dump it on the curb. I have my own life to tend to.

It's okay to relax; it really is. I keep telling myself.