WWCode Career Nav #15: You Need a Break
Written by Ellen Shapiro
From 2019 to early February 2022, I worked at Apollo GraphQL on the iOS SDK and some mobile DevRel stuff. Then there was a void between early February and late June when I started a new job at Gusto. I want to talk about my experiences during that void. I hope that my experience will help someone else avoid the worst of what I went through. Most of what led up to this was a fairly simple equation. Before the pandemic, I had done one talk a month worldwide for five years.
I did not leave the state of Wisconsin for 16 months after the beginning of the pandemic. Before the pandemic, I joined a co-working space because I hadn't enjoyed working from my house. In March 2020, just like everybody else, I worked back at my house anyway. I hated it. Things got worse during the Wisconsin winter when I could not see anyone except my wife, particularly when a polar vortex hit, and simply going outside was an exercise and pain. By April, I was finally able to get my vaccine, things started looking up. I went back to my co-working space, which was checking to make sure people were vaccinated. We even managed to cram in our postponed wedding ceremony at the beginning of August.
The wedding itself was amazing. Planning the wedding was exhausting. The week before the wedding, we had to change our mask guidance four times because the Delta wave was coming to let us all know that the pandemic was not done with us yet. I stopped going to my co-working space. Delta was finally starting to ebb in Wisconsin, then we got walloped with the initial Omicron wave. There was a point in December when UI announced they had to cancel their conference for 2022 because of the uncertainty. That news hit me like a ton of bricks. I had been looking forward to getting to see my friends and traveling. It wouldn't happen anywhere near as soon as I wanted it to. Once again, it was winter, it was warmer than last winter, but it was still winter in Wisconsin. Seeing people outdoors was very difficult unless they were willing to shiver around a fire pit with you. I've dealt with depression a lot over the last decade, but this was way beyond normal depression.
I knew from experience that I was burnt out and needed a break. I tried to fix things by taking a week-long vacation with my wife to visit folks in Los Angeles. It was a place where we could at least spend time with friends and family outdoors without freezing to death. It was great, and my mood markedly improved when I came back. I felt better, but my overall mental health was still in shambles. There were a couple of red flags I wish I had recognized sooner that were major warning signs that I needed a break.
The first was that even doing the most basic tasks was exhausting. When I initially wrote some documentation, I was churning out like 2500 words in a day. Trying to update just slivers of that took me multiple days. Answering questions on GitHub took everything out of me. The exhaustion also led me to use sleep as a crutch. I used it to avoid feeling bad about how little I had done. How could I get anything done when I was so tired, which had to have some kind of medical basis? It turns out the medical basis was depression. The biggest red flag was that building things didn't bring me joy. I've always been a huge workaholic. I love working, building things, and learning new stuff. I could not motivate myself to do those things because I was not enjoying them. I'd had a couple of people float the idea of taking a leave of absence to give myself time to heal, but I didn't wanna do it. I made awful excuses that I would like to share to help you recognize when you're saying something similar to yourself and interrogate whether you've got a valid concern or are making excuses.
The super obvious one was that all my depression and burnout were just a factor of the pandemic, and then I would be fine as soon as it was over. I didn't realize how much continuing to grind away as it went on and on made an eventual recovery without help less and less possible. I also had a lot of what-ifs that I worried over and used as an excuse. What if I weren't ready to return when I said I would? I am a compulsive people pleaser. Letting people down if I wasn't ready to come back after leaving was horrifying. Now, for some reason, I did not see that I was already letting people down and letting myself down because I was not able to get the work done. Even if I needed an extended leave, it probably would have been better for me to take it and be honest about how little I could get done, maybe trying to heal from some of that.
I also worried that it would be hard to stop thinking about work, and then I'd wind up just spiraling about it anyway. I didn't realize I was already spiraling. I was already thinking about work because I couldn't deal with how far behind I'd fallen. That led me to a couple of more terrifying worries. What if I took a leave of absence that didn't help? What if I was just as depressed as I was before? This is where my initial blaming of the pandemic came back to me. I didn't think it would help to take time off if the main cause of my depression, namely COVID-related isolation, was still going to be there. My darkest thought was worrying that being in isolation and not having work to distract me from how miserable I was about that isolation would make things much worse, maybe dangerously. I was so burned out I couldn't work. Something had to give, and it did. Apollo and I went our separate ways in early February. After that, I took what wound up being almost five months off. It helped way more than I ever thought it could.
I want to address some of my privileges that helped me do this. I realize this is not necessarily something that will be reasonable or easy for everybody to do. First of all, I had substantial savings in the bank. I generally try to keep enough money to live on for six months to a year and have as little debt as possible. I am lucky to be able to do that. One of the reasons is my wife, and I don't have kids. The kids are adorable. Kids are often lovely. Kids are invariably very, very expensive. This also meant that I didn't have caregiving responsibilities that could make taking a break from work less of a break than just a job switch. Other things that keep my expenses lower, I live in an area that is considerably cheaper than the Bay area. Our rent is less than half what it would be for a similar place in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I have enough experience that I was not worried that when I wanted to work again, I would not be able to find a job. I am very lucky that my severe burnout happened at a point in my career where I could be confident with that. I want you to bear these things in mind when discussing what I did. Not everyone will have the same privileges I had when they run into this. Given all that, what were the things that helped me move out of the worst of the bad burnout? First thing was to stop doing anything. After I got things wrapped up with Apollo, I paid my bills for the rest of the month. I closed my computer and did not reopen it for two weeks. I did not try to be productive in any way, shape, or form. I needed a hard reset. I needed to step away from the internet and veg out for a while. I read bits and pieces of a few books, but I didn't beat myself up when my attention span couldn't sustain me through the whole thing.
After that, I started by trying to find the things that brought me respite from the depression, things that scratch various creative inches. I kept fighting the urge to beat myself up for not moving through these things faster. While sometimes it went a lot slower than I wanted it to, I eventually found stuff that actively brought me joy. Once I had joy, something else came back: curiosity. When I worked through the first couple of chapters of the Rust language book, I knew that I had something I could build on. I hadn't built it yet, but I told folks I was ready to start interviewing. I felt like I was about two months away from being ready to work full-time again. I knew that I'd almost certainly have to go through multiple rounds of interviews at multiple places. I knew this was going to be exhausting. However, it gave me options regarding needing a less aggressive timetable and finding the companies to interview that I thought I could be excited about.
I'm happy that I'm now working at Gusto and had the time to find that solid fit. Even though I found the fit, I didn't start working immediately. I was planning a talk at the end of June that would be very difficult to write if I was also working. I also needed some time to recover from the drain of interviewing. Having the time just to let my curiosity run wild for that talk was a huge help. It made me even more excited when I started. I can't say I've completely recovered, but I am in a better place. I see a path to where I want to be instead of just a burnt jungle. Burnout is zero fun. Keep an eye out for symptoms. When you see it starting to creep in, start taking active countermeasures as soon as possible to prevent it from getting to the point I got to.
Acknowledge that there is terrible stuff going on in the world right now. While holding on to hope that it's going to get better is a great way to fight nihilism, assuming that it will get better at the rate your sanity needs it to will prevent you from taking steps to address your mental health when you most need to. Think about taking time off, particularly if someone suggests it as an option. If you don't want to, really interrogate yourself about why you're saying no. This is not to say no one will ever encourage you to take time off for disingenuous reasons, but far more often, they're just trying to help you feel less awful. If you do decide you need to take serious time off, take the opportunity to try to reset yourself away from work. It will eventually make going back to work a lot easier.