An IT story of getting out of burn-out and depression

I have never been good at talking about my own feelings. To expose myself in such a way always makes me feel vulnerable and I don’t like feeling vulnerable. However, after reading some very humble stories from people in IT having to deal with burnout and suffering from depression, I have decided to share my experiences as well, and more importantly, how I got out of it all.

The beginning

I used to work as a systems engineer for a bigger global enterprise. For the first time in my life, I would work with VMware technology such as vCenter server and VMware View. Not only would I have to keep all systems healthy in the office I was working, but I was also the one guy who had to solve server and storage issues when no one else could. It was a challenging time, but I loved it. I felt on top of the world and felt I could grow my capabilities beyond levels I had reached so far.

If there was one thing that made me frustrated at work it was a datacenter I had to run just by myself. The people we were running it for were some of the most demanding people in the field who didn’t hold back on giving the most de-motivational speeches ever. I was on standby 24/7, and my manager expected me to be on standby even during holidays. Which of course let to words with my then girlfriend. Because work kept creeping up during holidays.

A couple of years later I got the opportunity to move to a new global team in as the main VMware datacenter engineer in the team. After discussing this with my then girlfriend, we decided that this was an opportunity I should not let pass. It would give me more and better opportunities to grow my knowledge and build out my CV, but at the same time, I would have to travel more across the globe. Around that time my girlfriend got pregnant and gave birth to our daughter.

Crossroads

*** If in this next chapters you feel that some information is missing, I have left some information out on purpose. I won’t write anything that will put a my ex in a bad spotlight. ***

There was plenty to feel happy about: a new exciting function at work, my daughter.

However, as with all great stories, there was plenty of room for things to go wrong, and things did go horribly wrong. Following the birth of my daughter things started falling apart. My ex fell ill and had a hard time recovering. Meanwhile I had been on-boarded in this new top notch global datacenter team which came with more professional expectations. I was also still responsible to run this special datacenter too. As most families of our age, we had financial debt. The pressure inside me kept building up.

So I did what most men do: I made the right functional choice, but the wrong emotional choice. It drove me mad that I was being pushed into having to choose my job over my family in most cases, but I assumed this was all part of growing older and building up maturity.
If men are very good at making instant decisions be it good or bad ones, when solving emotion problems we clearly choose the 5-year plan over the immediate gratification plan because choosing the 5-year functional plan, is choosing the lesser emotional confrontational path. I took a turn left on the crossroad that is life.

The breaking point

Two years later, the pressure cooker was near to exploding. I had been telling my colleagues that I was dealing with personal issues for a couple of years, but after a while, even the best of colleagues don’t know how to respond and react to this anymore. I also had been complaining for ages to my management that I needed to have a solution for this special datacenter but no proper decision was ever made and I kept sucking it up and kept doing my work.

My relationship with my ex was in a downward spiral but I was too blind to see how bad it actually was. I was too focused on the financial needs we had as a family. My ex felt misunderstood by me, and I felt misunderstood by both my management and my ex.

We split up.
My ex took our daughter and moved back to Denmark.

My world crumbled around me and I held on to what I know best, my job.

Depression and burn-out hit home

For the next two years, my focus shifted from earning enough money for medication and debt to earning enough money to visit my daughter monthly and pay of the outstanding debt. By this time I realized I had to change jobs or I would crumble to nearly nothing.

Everyday I woke up majorly unhappy and depressed. Completely burned-out as well. Some people will say that you cannot be burned out if you can still go to work, but in my book that is not true. You would be surprised to what misery a human can and will go through for a child, despite all the unhappiness, depression and open bile void in his or her life.

So I buried my feelings down in a pit under layers and layers of functional motivation. My sole drive, apart from willing to see my daughter once a month, was making sure I could move jobs. I sacrificed all my spare time studying.

A job change

The day I give my resignation at work, my management got a shock. My local manager told me he expected my resignation a year ago, when I had nothing but negativity around me, but not this year. I gave him the honest answer: I was not ready to move jobs, I needed more experience and needed to study and prepare for a new job.

I quit my job and joined ITQ.

My depression started fading as soon as I had my first talk with ITQ.
I signed my contract. There was finally light emerging at the horizon.

However, despite having something to look forward too, something that I could feel happy about, I was not happy. Sure my depression was fading but I still was feeling unhappy and burned out.

There shall be hope

One evening while driving my car I was feeling very unhappy again an nearly burst into tears and it hit me. I needed to change the way I was thinking about what was happening in my life or I would feel this unhappy for a very long time.

With a pang I realized I had the toolbox to solve my problem. Years ago a friend introduced me to NLP and the technique that really caught my attention was re-framing. This is not something special, all people re-frame to make more sense of events happening in their life. It defines how we are able to perceive the world around us and also how fast we can cope with events happening in our lives. I just needed to give myself a nudge in the right direction.

Right there and then I decided that I would try to see the positive about all the challenges I was facing. It took months to create this new habit. But after a few months, I didn’t feel that unhappy anymore.

On a drive to visit my daughter it hit home.. I can feel happy again.

Conclusion

So there you have it, I used a one trick pony to get out of my bad feelings.
I still visit my daughter once a month but rather than feeling sorry for myself, I prefer to feel lucky that I can visit my daughter once a month.

While working that feverishly on getting the necessary experience to change jobs I put friendships on hold. Never again.

I love my job, but there are limits to what I am willing to do for it.

Could I have changed jobs to an equally ‘important job’ before my relationship blew up? I doubt it, because I didn’t have the right skill set for a job as the one I am doing now. You can only accomplish that much with the right motivation. I honestly believe there was no ideal way out.

Afterthoughts about my previous job

For many years I did blame some of my managers for the ‘unfairness of the responsibility ‘ for that one particular datacenter which put my relation under that much unnecessary stress. In reality, all I had to do was leave.
My managers tried to help me, but not in the ways I expected them to help me and they too were victims of a business that didn’t see the need to mitigate the risk of having only a single engineer to take care of a business critical datacenter.


Kim Out..