When my dad passed away in 2019 I thought I had hit my rock bottom. I was unmotivated, crying at the slightest provocation, my tummy always hurt and I was procrastinating harder than ever. My career in software engineering was still shiny and new so I sought out help from mental health professionals. My first therapist ever at the age of 26 diagnosed me with situational depression. It was nice having a name for a problem that wasn’t my name. It was nice to think that I wasn’t succeeding because of something within but, ultimately, disparate from me and, according to the label, temporary and surmountable.
The following few years I continued to have gut issues. Feeling unwell, feeling overwhelmed and unable to cope. Procrastination was worse than it had ever been and I had always procrastinated since I was a child. When you put off working on easy problems like essays or math problems, you can still meet the deadlines in time with a burst of focus. Unfortunately, if you’re working on harder problems with unknowns and evolving deliverables (as in software development) procrastination becomes your greatest enemy, as it did mine.
Missing timelines and deadlines results in ever growing impostor syndrome, feeling inadequate for taking up space in a highly competitive career, and feeling even worse for fulfilling toxic stereotypes about women in technology (or at least that’s how I felt). However, I persisted and I was able to get promoted multiple times despite my struggles. I wasn’t consistent in my output, but in the days and weeks of clarity and hyper fixated focus I was able to balance out the days and weeks of distractibility and low performance.
For most people the perfect storm can be spotted a mile away. You see a line of tarot cards turning over one by one, showing each disaster culminating in a breakdown. For me, it was brewing unseen under the surface. I was always playing a balancing act between doing little enough that I could de-stress and doing so much that I could keep myself engaged and distracted. If I did too little I could get nothing done and if I did too much I could get nothing done. I looked at tutorials and self help books on how to be better, how to accomplish more without working longer and longer hours, how to be a good partner to my now-husband at home, and how to be a good teammate to my peers at work.
I had just gotten promoted to P30 which at Adobe signifies being a mid-level engineer, someone on their path to becoming a senior developer. I was happy, but I was suddenly apprehensive and worried. I had also embarked on a move to my new home in Seattle, away from my team, and away from all my friendships. If I had worked this hard thus far just to stay afloat… how would I balance my career with my potential future as a parent. How could I possibly solve bigger problems required of a senior dev with the hours of the day I had now? And in a world where a woman’s career rarely matters as much as that of a man’s once children enter the picture, I was afraid I had reached a ceiling I had never seen coming. So far I had always been able to play this delicate balancing act, but not anymore.
That is when the panic attacks began. I had stressed cried before, from school work or a late night here and there. I had sought out solutions like consuming edibles to get a good night rest or trying to exercise (but more often than not binging chocolate). I knew something bad was happening when I would feel like the world was ending each Sunday night. And I knew something had to change when I woke up sobbing in the middle of the night. Now my body was reacting to something my brain could not make sense of. It felt like I had lost control and could no longer steer my ship and even worse, I hadn’t been paying enough attention to turn back the way I had come.
That was a bit more than a year ago, near the end of 2022. I frantically called my primary doctor asking for help and took time off from work. I was scared I would start crying during my meetings and have no words to explain what was wrong. I was always known as the happy-go-lucky person, the one who made jokes (albeit sometimes inappropriate ones) and who tried to lighten the mood for the rest of the world. For the first time ever I felt like the lights in my soul had been turned off and I was so scared they would never turn back on. That’s why I asked my doctor for a prescription (for the anxiety she said I had), to right the chemical imbalance that was in my brain. In a world where everyone is different, it’s hard to know what “normal” is, but I knew what I was experiencing was not any normal I had ever encountered before.
The trick to solving a problem is that you can’t solve a problem with the mindset used to create it. I had to make a change. That is why I sought to find an alternative to my current work/life situation and that meant finding a different role. I am blessed a million times over to have had the best managers of my career all at Adobe. Managers who saw the weaknesses in myself and supported me with compassion and patience. My manager, Andra, helped me find a different project to contribute to: one that was primarily based in Seattle, one that was in a tech stack I wanted to work on (where I could shine more readily), and one that made me feel important — Adobe Express.
Once I was on solid ground again after half a year with this new team, I could not go back. Mainly because my old team had seen a side of me that I wanted to leave behind. When I was stressed and imbalanced I wasn’t positive, or nice, or constructive. I was clawing to the surface trying to be better but it wasn’t working. I was also afraid that the storm had originated in my environment but I have since come to understand that the eye of the storm was within me. My previous manager Andra, my director Ravi, my current manager Sai, my current director Dave, and the leadership in another team within Photoshop that would have welcomed me with open arms all spent countless hours discussing with me what I wanted, where I could thrive and contribute, and how I could be supported. I feel tears prickling in my eyes as I recall how supportive everyone was during this challenging time.
Which is why I continued to investigate the source of my anxiety and depression. I had never before felt this way in my life. Something had inherently changed in me when my dad passed away, that I knew, but I also know that loss is a part of life and I am not alone in this. I knew that I was apprehensive of the future in which bigger problems would be the norm. And most of all, I knew that I could not be a procrastinator in the future I envisioned for myself.
One day as I was googling for the millionth time whether I had anxiety or not, I saw a correlation between anxiety and ADHD. Supposedly these two ailments are often mixed during diagnosis or go hand in hand. I could understand why since my anxiety stemmed from my inability to deliver in every facet of my life: from having difficulty up keeping relationships, cleaning my home, or completing work on time, to having trouble listening in conversations, or ever finish any personal project. I religiously used my calendar to remember everything, I used notes app to keep my thoughts from rattling in my head, and I tried to find ways to upstart my productivity other than impending deadlines.
As the novelty of working on this new project at work I started to wean off, I knew I had to figure out my problem so I could formulate a solution. That is how I sought out help from a psychiatrist for the first time in my life. Prior to seeing them I began stretching out my feelers to the people in my life to ask if maybe they thought I had ADHD. 100% of everyone I talked to said that they believed I already knew this about myself and several had their own ADHD diagnoses and confirmed that my behavior aligned with their own. Things started to make sense.
This morning as I lay in bed thinking about my psychiatrist agreeing that I did indeed have ADHD… I began to feel emotional. It suddenly felt like it wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t do what seemed to be so easy for other people. That I wasn’t lazy or rude and that there was a light at the end of this tunnel. It also made me so much more grateful for every manager, peer, and friend I have in my life (and my hubs obviously). In many contexts where I have failed at managing my time or delivering what I thought was an easy promise, they gave me patience and grace, room to adapt and grow, and the stable ground on which I stand today to finally have an answer to the things I always thought I could simply will myself to overcome.
We all carry a different story, a different normal, the green I see is not the green you see, the meaning of words I read will never be exactly the same meaning in the words you read, so I urge you to question everything you experience and consider if there are many answers to the struggles you face. I wish I had asked sooner, moral failings aside, what could be the reason I cannot do the things I wish I could?
Illustrated by Meli 