This post is different from normal Hackaday fare. I don’t want to presume anything about you, but I’m pretty sure the story I’m about to share resonates with at least some of you.

I’ve been having a tough time, exacerbated by this age of social distancing. This all crept up on me at first, but as I began to look back on my behavior and moods, I began noticing patterns that I hadn’t noticed before. This is certainly a relevant issue in this community, so let’s talk about mental health, beginning with my own journey.

Discovering the Problem

I am a prolific maker. I always have projects that I’m working on, projects that I’m thinking about working on, and projects that I’m getting paid to work on. I have an idea about how long the projects should take, and I get stressed and frustrated and beat myself up when they take longer than I think they should. I can’t admit defeat, so I continue the project until it is complete, but all of the joy is gone because it was stressful more than fun while I was working on it. Even at completion it’s difficult to enjoy the product because I’m already behind on starting the next thing in my queue (you may remember my earlier article on dealing with time debt). Further, I haven’t documented the project enough for my own satisfaction, so I’m uncomfortable sharing it to the public. It’s a perpetual problem, leading to perpetual grump.

I see other people on Hackaday and YouTube who are also prolific makers, but they have millions of subscribers, do much cooler projects, and put them out at a frequency I could only dream of. Imposter syndrome creeps in. I work harder on my projects, spending more and more time on them; the family makes fun of the fact that I’m the “basement troll” whose primary line is “I have to work on my projects.” Weekends are spent primarily watching YouTube and scrolling Reddit (but not contributing) and beating myself up for not working harder and getting on top of my pile of things to fix or improve around the house.

I have no social life to speak of. I had a plan, but the pandemic trashed that, and I still haven’t discovered a solution. People assume that I’m super busy and don’t have time to socialize, but the reality is that working on projects is a default for me, but not a preference, and it’s a thing I can do alone, so it’s easy to fall into.

The inner voice is loud, constant, and extremely critical. It tells me my work isn’t good enough, I’m not fast enough, I’m not interesting enough to have friends. Just to put something out there is a huge risk, and anyone who reads Hackaday regularly knows that the commenters are really good at identifying the slightest mistakes, meaning I agonize about every sentence far longer than I should.

This has been getting worse for years, though I didn’t notice and …read more

Source:: Hackaday