On mental health

Today I had one of those days of feeling down and not being able to pinpoint the exact reason. We are back from attending a conference in Buenos Aires, Swiftable, and found my mother suffering from anxiety attacks due to recent traumatic events. It’s manifesting as back pains, and she is trying to convince herself that’s a physical problem. So I’m trying to convince her about the importance of going to a psychologist. This is affecting me a lot, and I’m trying to be strong for her.

Tuist is also draining me a lot. I’m excited about everything that’s ahead, but the closer we get to the release, the further I feel from the finish line. And because I continue to work on it full-time without a salary, this is drilling my brain. Not that I don’t have savings, but not having a source of income makes me mentally uncomfortable. And the recent Bitrise events didn’t help. Someone who has been in business for longer might think this is normal, but I’m not yet emotionally prepared to deal with this type of competition moves. I might go to therapy when I’m back in Berlin to learn how to deal with this.

Besides all of this, I think my relationship with social networks is not helping. I think it’s important to continue to be present on X and Mastodon because that’s where the users of Tuist are. But at the same time, it’s a huge mental stretch to my list of responsibilities in the project: development, support, community engagement… Also, being on X and Mastodon triggers many thinking streams. Is it positive? It is, I get many ideas from it. But if I don’t limit the bandwidth that I dedicate to it, it can be overwhelming. I get ideas that I’d like to play with, but I don’t have the time for them. I can go from excitement to exhaustion from one day to another. When I’m exhausted, my natural reaction is to disconnect from everything.

I’m also emotionally processing some surprising realities that I learned about the tech industry by accident. One of them is everything that happened at Shopify. It was in May, but it continues to be a recurring thought in my mind. I feel lied and a chip in a game of billionaires. I worked hard towards some professional growth that was all a story to get me to overcommit to the company. I know it won’t happen again, but I can’t avoid feeling bad about having fallen into that trap. The other one is the exploitable nature of open-source, which I suffered through Tuist. Because open source exists within the tech industry, and the tech industry exists within capitalism, where companies have no obligation to give back to society, they treat open source as a free resource that they can exploit. Companies can go as far as to tell everyone that you are a bad person because you are taking steps to protect yourself from that exploitation. This is tough to process emotionally.

There might be other factors contributing to these emotional swings, but those are the ones I’m the most aware of. I suffer from mental health breakdowns from time to time, and I think it’s important to share them. When I feel down, I take a break from everything and use the space to reflect on what’s happening. I also make sure exercising is part of my routine. Even though I don’t run as often as I used to, but doing casual runs helps me to clear my mind.