This post’s ID is 45328166434486543.
Content warning: this post contains a mentions of a suicide attempt and multiple psychotic episodes. I obviously survived them, but those who are sensitive to such things should skip the sections that I have labelled appropriately.
When I was a young man,
I lived in New England.
I was sleeping on porches;
well, okay, I guess I weren’t really sleeping.
And officer, I know where we’re going
by the way the cuffs shine.
Hell, sometimes, home is any place that’s dry.Any place (growing up), by Ramshackle Glory, off the 2013 album Shelter
I went to New York (city and state) this past weekend to try to run from my problems a bit. This is a very personal blog post, admittedly. I maybe, based off the subject matter, should’ve interspersed snippets from one of the Mountain Goats’ Going to songs, but they don’t have a Going to New York that I’m familiar with, and to be quite honest I spent most of the trip listening to Shelter on repeat, so Any place (growing up) feels like a more appropriate song choice.
Like I said, this is very personal. I don’t like talking about my actual-factual real-life feelings on the Internet, least of all on what has mostly been a technical blog. But the fact of the matter is, I have been struggling at home in Austin. I’ve been continually behind at work and only sometimes successful in catching up. My home has continually looked like a disaster, and in fact I’m only just now succeeding in making it look actually presentable for the first time since I moved in.
I don’t really want to go that deep into my struggles at work. They’re very personal, and for all I know someday someone at my job is going to be reading this, and I don’t want to proactively put my foot in my mouth or say something I’ll regret. Suffice to say that I don’t always feel like I’m good at my job, or even just good at having a job, and that can cause stress that can spiral in ways that are hard for me to recover from effectively. I’m getting better, but it’s hard to feel like I’m not continually very close to getting fired.
I think I’ve been in a more-or-less continuous spiral of burnout since sometime last summer.
I was working on Main Street,
washing rich people’s dishes.
Get off, have some drinks with the waiters,
fall asleep under county bridges.
It was cold, it was wet,
I would have sworn to you it was fine.
Hell, sometimes, home is any place you find.
During the summer of 2025, I interned at an aerospace company in Los Angeles before my senior year of college. I will note that I did not work in defense.
I didn’t really do any research or groundwork before moving to Los Angeles, and ended up in a somewhat-shady AirBnB in a somewhat-shady part of the city. I didn’t have my car, so the commute was about 40 minutes each way to work (because the city has given up on certain parts of the South Bay with respect to public transit, so far as I can tell). I got used to being cat-called or harassed several times a day (one day, four separate men pulled to the side of the road and “offered me a ride”). Moreover, I overexerted myself at work, felt isolated from what friends I did have in the city, and was on medication that I later learned is not effective for my particular menagerie of symptoms.
So I did what any self-respecting young woman in Los Angeles does when she feels destroyed and oppressed by her environment, and overdosed on the Hollywood walk of fame. I was sent to the worst hospital I have ever had the displeasure of spending a week and a half in (and I have spent a week and a half in many hospitals), and when I got out, some of those I had previously been friends with did not want to be friends anymore. I do not blame them for that, or anything that happened.
I had been working at my internship for a week total. I obviously had accrued no paid time off or sick leave, so I had to eat the week of unpaid leave and return immediately if I wanted to be able to continue affording to live in the aforementioned AirBnB. The details of what happened the rest of the summer are more-or-less not important to the story, but I never really fully had time to recover.
Then it was time for school, and I struggled. I had no motivation to do much of anything, and at a certain point of your college career, depending on what you study, the things you study will cease to just come to you with little effort. I failed classes and was put on academic probation.
The next semester did not improve; in fact, the stress and pressure got to the point where I had a series of psychotic episodes culminating in being hospitalized for another week and a half (this time in Temple, Texas, where nothing good ever happens). I got out, learned that consuming unsafe amounts of caffeine let me focus, and barely graduated with my bachelor’s in computer engineering.
Yes, if you’re wondering why I get so much math wrong on this blog, it’s because my highest education is a bachelor’s in computer engineering.
After graduation, I went on a trip with some friends to San Francisco and had to fly home early because I was left bedridden and confined to the hotel room by constant crippling anxiety. Two or so weeks later, I moved to Austin and started my current job, and have been somewhat struggling as previously mentioned.
I’ve been doing slightly better lately. My medication is in a really good place, I’ve been relatively stable. But I decided, somewhat in the spur of the moment, to go and fly somewhere to get my mind off things.
I got a little bit older
and moved across the country,
running from old habits;
well, okay, I was running from most things.
I swear that the desert’s going to be the end of me
when I look in your eyes. Hell, sometimes,
I think home’s wherever you die.
Any place you die.
I have three basic options I consider every time I want to fly somewhere impulsively:
I had already been to San Francisco and Cambridge this year, and moreover the friend I usually stay with in Cambridge was busy. New York it was. I texted some friends to check who would be around and who I could stay with, and booked the flights five days beforehand. I decided to take Friday off as PTO and already had Monday off for Labor Day (yes, we celebrate labor movements in September in the States!).
I was invited to a party in (I think, I wasn’t the one navigating) Greenwich Village, which was really fun, though I admittedly have never followed so many people on Twitter at a party. It felt a little nice to feel like the dumbest person in the room, once I got used to it; people would discuss mathematics that I did not understand, and I would nod my head sagely and say “yes, yes, but what if you apply Yao’s XOR lemma?”.
That’s a joke, I never brought up Yao’s lemma. People did discuss math I didn’t understand, though.
I slept about two hours that night, because early in the morning I had to go to Moynihan train hall to catch the Adirondack to see a friend in Poughkeepsie (/pəˈkɪpsi/, for those not in the know).
I had a wonderful time hanging out with her. She’s a lovely young woman, and Poughkeepsie is a beautiful little town.
Solid maybe. I got home and the apartment was still a nightmare, and I have work tomorrow as I write this that I’m not sure I’m ready for. I already cancelled another committment I had today to have more time to myself.
But I got some perspective. Maybe it was the sheer number of people who told me I should move to New York, maybe it was just giving myself time away from my problems for the first time in what felt like a really long time. But I am reminded that there are always options, and I am never locked into anything forever. Moreover, problems are fixable; something about looking down from the 32nd floor of an apartment building and looking up from a train through the bottom of the Hudson Valley reminded me that my problems are really somewhat small as such things go.
The rest of the pictures I took on my Mavica this trip are below. I apologize for not being a very good photographer.
