Note: This article was not authored by me, Lee Dohm, but by a fellow open source maintainer that has granted me permission to post it here so that it can be shared anonymously in the hopes of helping others that are dealing with burnout or other stress-related issues.
This is my story of falling deep into a hole and climbing out of it. A story of my views and how open source helped me grow. This is not a generic guide of burnout. It is not a description of the signs to look out for in yourself, a coworker or a friend. My hope is that this will help someone learn from my mistakes and seek out help if they need it. You are strong if you ask for help.
Disclaimer: I don't intend any harm to anyone involved. People have made mistakes but all of them are forgiven. That is why I have kept any names out of this text.
This started out as a normal weekend for me. I was spending some with friends virtually because we all lived in far apart and in multiple countries. We were playing games and having fun.
One friend was getting very drunk and everyone, myself included, was pushing them to drink more and more. Eventually they left the call without saying anything. We assumed they had went to bed.
Later someone is asking about this friends accident, the friend is hospitalized. There is no more information. I reached out and asked the friend privately what had happened. This is the single sentence reply I got:
Jumped off the balcony.
I immediately connected the events in my head. I blamed myself for edging them on to drink more. The worst part is that I was told privately. I was the only one that knew exactly what had happened. I couldn't talk to my friends about it. Therapy was not considered by me because the views I have heard in my life is that it's only people that there are something wrong with that go to therapy. I have realized how wrong this is, the people that go to therapy are the ones that attempt to heal and fix the things wrong and the ones that don't go are the ones with problems. These comments I have heard probably come from their own insecurities that they haven't dealt with.
I was sad. I was alone. I was in a dark place. I still went to work every day but my motivation to work was lacking. The situation at work that I was in helped contribute to the feeling of being alone. The project I was working on had been neglected for six months. The project lead didn't have time for meetings and I was the only one working on it. Some coworkers were interested and asked questions which helped me keep going and having some kind of progress.
What I should have done here is to reach out to HR or anyone for help. To open up and talk about how I was feeling and what was going on. But I couldn't because I felt so alone with my problem. Eventually the CEO of the company noticed my lacking performance and I was let go. I was never asked why my performance was lacking suddenly, I was just attacked and blamed. I was not given any space to open up. The work I had been doing was not of any lacking quality. My performance was just not satisfying the CEO and the only solution they could see was to let me go.
In my view this is the start of the story. There are other events in my life prior to this that contributed to my feelings of sadness and that maybe makes this event even worse than it should have been for me. It's hard to say, your feelings are your feelings. Don't feel bad about feeling bad. Allow yourself to feel bad, ask yourself why you feel bad. To reflect and improve.
I got another job, in the beginning it was good. New friends were met and we were having fun. It was helping me climb out of my mess. I was doing better. Not by dealing with the issue at hand, but by pushing it aside and focusing on other things. The sadness was still inside me. This is what I have learned to do my whole life, push away the bad feelings and focus on something else.
Eventually all the coworkers at that company had quit or was let go and no replacement was ever recruited. Suddenly I was alone again. The only other people working there were in management. And I never had any good relationship with any of them.
My feelings were coming back to me. The distraction was gone. I started drinking to numb the feelings. I stopped interacting with friends outside of work regularly, I stopped interacting with online friends. Every weekend was spent alone and drinking. My connection with both online friends and real life friends was fading.
One day on the job I discovered a new tool and I liked it a lot from the first use. It helped me improve my productivity at work a lot. I was using it every day and while learning the tool I was also discovering a lot of bugs. Eventually I was tinkering with this tool more than actual work. I opened a ticket on the project with one of the bugs I had found. It was well written and with clear steps to reproduce. It took me 5 minutes to write the bug ticket and the whole day to get the courage to post it. I was so deep down a hole with absolutely no confidence in myself. I spent the whole day doing meaningless rewording of the description and testing out the steps, even rebooting my computer to verify that it still reproduced and actually was an issue. While ensuring that your steps are good for anyone to follow is a good practice, it is not something that takes hours to do. Just an extra 10-15 minutes should be enough.
I kept helping out in the project in every way that I could. Mostly I was going through the backlog of tickets and spotting duplicates adding a comment that they were duplicates. This was difficult, I spent hours reading through every comment in the ticket to ensure that it was without any doubt a duplicate. I was growing a lot in reading and understanding how the users were communicating. Interpreting what they are trying to say, instead of just blindly reading what they write. Because more often than not, a ticket is written far too vauge for anyone to understand. I got a new sense of understanding of how others were communicating. It helped me improve the way I wrote tickets to the project because I wanted it to be clear and perfect for anyone to understand.
Eventually I had built up the courage to fix one of the bugs myself. The issue was not a big deal, it was a minor thing and a few lines of code would fix it. It took maybe an hour to fix, everything included: Narrowing down what is the issue, reading API docs, finding a similar solution in a different repository, writing tests... but finding the courage to open the pull request took me days. And in the end when I opened the PR I did not include the tests because I had thought they were flawed. Instead I opened the PR without tests and asked how to write tests. I got directed to write them exactly as I had originally done.
This kept going on for a few months and eventually the maintainers reached out to me - they wanted me to be a maintainer of the project. I accepted and kept on doing what I was doing, except I could now close the tickets that I spotted as duplicates.
This helped me gain confidence over the following months. I learned a lot about communication and I gained confidence in myself. I became the person to reach out to if you wanted some issue reproduced or a pull request tested. The growth I had been feeling myself months earlier was felt by everyone. I was enjoying doing these things a lot, more than I was enjoying my day job. Because the day job was connected to painful feelings and reality. This was an escape, but not a meningless one. My thoughts, feelings, actions, help, everything I could do and did was appreciated so much. I started spending incresingly more hours at my day job working on the open source project instead of the work I was hired to do.
Although I had found a lot of happiness with what I was doing, I had not dealt with my issues. It was just another distraction. I was also still drinking heavily every weekend to distract myself from my issues.
The open source work I was doing was helping me grow confidence and grow myself. I was feeling like a much better person but I did not realize that I was still distracting myself from the issue at hand. It had since long been known what had happened to my friend and I could have reached out and talked to them or my other friends that night but I never stopped to reflect and understand what was actually going on.
I started becoming addicted to the distraction. It was the only was to keep me going. I kept doing more and more hours of open source work every day. Eventually I reached a point where I was working 16 hours per day. I spent 8 hours at my normal day job, got home and spent the entire afternoon until late night working on the open source project. Weekends were spent working on the open source project while drinking alcohol.
A thursday morning going to work, exhausted. With a pain radiating from my heart throughout my chest. It's not a new feeling. It has been there for a while, but I have ignored it and kept going. The last time I had gotten any sleep was on Saturday night when I passed out from drinking. I had been spending the nights in bed trying to get some sleep but I was so worked up that I just couldn't.
A lot of time in bed was spent on youtube and one video I came across was about burnout. This helped me realize that I was feeling the same thing.
I reached out to the other maintainers of the open source project that morning and said that I needed some break. I was feeling burned out and couldn't keep it up. It's the first time in a years that I reached out because something was wrong with me and I needed to be heard. I could do this because the community was a safe place. I knew before I was writing the message that I would be heard and understood and I had the confidence to do it thanks to the work I had been doing.
The other maintainers had no idea what I was going through and how I am actually feeling. It's very easy to put on a different face on the internet and hide your emotions from the people you communicate with.
When I got a reply saying that it was ok and that I should take as much time off as I need I was overwhelmed with emotion and started crying uncontrollably. The first time in a long time I let myself feel the sadness that had been building up in me. I felt one of the greatest feelings there is, relief.
My mistake here was that I didn't reach out to anyone privately. I was still going to work and working normally, just keeping away from the open source project. After a week of staying away from the distraction the feelings started coming back and I found myself needing a distraction. I opened a new tab of GitHub issues and went on looking through the new issues that had come in. This project got a lot of them, there were over 100 new issues. 10 minutes after browsing through the issues the pain in my chest was back and I was feeling horrible again. My distraction was no longer working and it was just causing a different pain. The pain in my chest was left the entire day and I didn't get any sleep that night.
And I kept coming back every now and then with the same feelings. But I managed to contribute something and find the root cause of an important but hard to track down issue. But it cost me a lot to do so, and I should have just kept away. The addiction to the distraction was so strong but it was also causing physical pain.
I had been forced into a corner where I had to deal with my issues in order to keep going. I realized that all of this was just distractions and came up with a plan where I would:
- Talk about that night with someone
- Stop distracting myself from my problems and face them
- Start talking openly about my problems
- Allow myself the time to stop, take a step back, and reflect
I made a lot of mistakes during these years but thanks to GitHub and all the maintainers of this open source project I have grown and learned from my mistakes.
I have started dealing with problems head on. I am less afraid of opening up. I work at an amazing place where I can open up and say if I am feeling unsafe, stressed or anything. I am met with understanding and love. I try and help out others at work if I notice they are feeling stressed about something. Let them know that they are not alone and that I am there for them.
If anyone reaches out to you with anything. Privately or at work. Take the time to hear them out. Give them a space to talk. Recommend professional help if you think they need it. Help them understand that there is nothing wrong with seeking out help. I don't want to imagine where I would be today if I did not find help in open source to grow confidence and figure out my mistakes.
I have an eternal gratitude towards GitHub and the maintainers of this open source project. Thank you for teaching me and for being so loving and understanding towards a stranger on the internet <3