I’m reading an article (Slivers) from @Impossible_PhD on the Stained Glass Woman site, and I just came across this:

“If you’re lucky, the result of this is burnout, which is a combined flop/flood collapse. If you’re unlucky, it becomes cPTSD.

Often, though? It becomes both.”

And suddenly a light went on in my head. Two years and a month ago I quit a job I’d held for 13 years as a computer programmer, and I had worked as a programmer or system adminstrator going back as far as 1994 before that. I quit because I was burned out. How burned out? I would not wake up until almost right at 10am when I’d have to get online for a daily stand-up meeting. Sometimes I’d even do the meeting from bed. Then after the meeting I’d make breakfast, and maybe 3 days of the week I’d then go back to bed and not get up again until after noon. The other days I’d sit online for a couple of hours just reading Discord or news websites, and then I’d go back to bed. In the late afternoon, I might finally get the energy and will to actually do some real work. So yeah, really seriously, incredibly, astoundingly burned out.

So I quit. At first I played games. Then I started learning how to write games, thinking I could turn my programming skills in a new direction. But then, even that stopped holding my interest and I gave that up too. Since then I’ve struggled to find the willpower to look for a new job, because I know that thanks to my 30 year career in the computer industry (mostly) working with computers is the only thing I know how to do, so if I go back to work I’m likely to end up in another job that I hate and just burn out all over again. Looking for a new job is kind of terrifying to me and makes me emotionally shut down, hard.

So I burned out. And what am I doing now? I basically have flashbacks whenever I think about being a programmer again. I avoid places and people that remind me of it – I quit the programming related Discord servers I was in, for example. I no longer really see myself as a computer toucher of any kind and I feel dread when I think about it. The thought of going back to programming makes me feel like a worthless failure and makes my chest tighten up. I no longer talk to any of my old colleagues. And computers, once a central focus of my life for decades, no longer hold any meaning or inspire joy anymore. Folks, those sound an awful lot like CPTSD symptoms.

I think now I understand why I am having such a hard time getting myself to look for a new job and why I react so badly to the thought of going back into the computer industry. I didn’t just burn out. My job actually became a source of every day, low level trauma for me and now I’m dealing with the consequences of that.

This sucks.

Oh! And while I don’t neccessarily think I have CPTSD caused by my old career, I do think I have CPTSD from gender related trauma growing up, and maybe it and my career burnout decided to get together and do a little tango with each other.

I’ll also drop this little self assessment result here for grins.