Introduction

Over the past couple years, I have started to become more and more inactive in the open source projects I am involved. This has been in most part due to my mental health, and is something I am still trying navigate, so the future is still up in the air.

I wanted to write this post to help clarify where I am with regards to my commitments, but also because I believe it would be helpful to talk about my struggles publicly. Mental health is a topic that is still unconfortable for many people, so I wanted to share my experience to help show people that might be going through a similar situation that they are not along. I'm also hoping that maybe people who have gone through something similar may have some some advice.

My situation

For several years now I have been struggling with depression, it is something that has taken a very big hold on my life. There are many components to it, but one of the key things I struggle with is feeling a lack of purpose. Over the years, I think one of my main way to cope with this has been to leaning on objective metrics of my work output (eg. project contributions), which isn't great because it makes me dependent my productivity, and the visibility of my work output.

A couple years ago, I also discovered I have ADHD, which explained why I have a lot of difficulty to control my focus. Briefly, my focus can drift very easily, making it difficult to keep focus on one thing unless it very stimulating to me. This likely played a role on me getting to the position I am now, since it caused to shift my focus into things I would have perhaps just ignored, but at the price of making me dysfunctional in a lot of scenarios.

Anxiety is something I also struggle with, but it is generally easier to manage. Since it is usually triggered by specific things, by making an effort to avoid possibly triggering situations, I am able to make it so that anxiety is not something I struggle on a daily basis. However, it becomes a bigger issue when it couples with some of my other issues, which make it more difficult for me to control the environment, and lower the threshold needed to induce anxiety.

Medication helps with this, but it isn't a magic solution. My depression medication mostly helps me stabilize, making it a bit less likely for me to go down a depressive episode, but it does not prevent it, and it comes with side-effects such as headaches. The ADHD medication makes it easier to control my focus, but it has a limited duration, and the anxiety medication mostly helps alleviate it, not prevent it.

This has impacted my life very much, as it makes certain environments unsuitable for me. When I was in college, things got bad to the point I had to quit. After that, I started working, which allowed me to stabilize things, but I then started struggling more with controlling my focus, which was when I discovered about my ADHD. Since then, I have been trying to figure out how to balance everything, but still haven't been able to.

Struggling with productivity on my job started to take a toll on my motivation and self-worth. It also lead me to be more mentally exhausted, which then caused me to pull back on my open source contributions, further worsening my motivation and self-worth. Starting to take the medication for ADHD helped things a bit, but it has a limited duration, even at the maximum dosage. While things managed to improve a bit, I was still struggling with productivity, so my job arrangement changed from working full time to being on an hourly basis, with the agreement that I'd only work when I felt like I was being able to be productive. This was a better arrangement for my anxiety due to me not having to force myself to work while not being productive.

In the months before my job arrangement changed, my mental health started to get significantly worse. On top of the productivity issues, I was also dealing with a toxic relationship, and was struggling with selfharm. This lead me to change my psychiatrist roughly at the same time as my job arrangement changed. With the new psychiatrist, I was able to stabilize things, but they didn't want me to take the ADHD medication due to the possibly of it causing dependence. Already struggling with productivity and motivation, this made things a bit worse, but now my ability to be productive was directly tied to my income. Roughly at that same time, I also moved, and after a while I started struggling a bit financially, and started having more anxiety. Things kept getting worse, and it ended up in me attempting to take my own life earlier this year. I have been recovering since. Thankfully there were no sequelae, so everything is okay.

At the time of writing, I am still not in a good place, but I have mostly recovered from what happened. I am trying to sort things out and figure out what I should do next. On my next psychiatrist appointment I will discuss getting back on the ADHD medication.

Conclusion

Due to everything that happened, I haven't been able to work on any non-job related projects. I know some people were looking forward to some of my planned work, so I wanted to talk about that.

At this point, I am still unsure of when/if I am gonna be able to get back to how things were before. My current focus is on finding a healthy way to work on job related projects, and then start getting back to my other open source contributions. The priority on my open source contributions will be the new sysconfig API.