SIGCONT

I have never been really good at blogging consistently. The truth is: it’s hard, for multiple reasons. I used to write without fear when I was younger, so what happened?

Over the last five years, I learnt a lot about various topics and the more I was learning, the more I was scared of actually not knowing anything. And this weird feeling became much stronger after I had a life incident 3.5 years ago. All of this evolved into a form of anxiety disorder, which I tried to fight by myself for 3 years. My last round-trip to an emergency service for nothing convinced me to go to “see someone”. My self-esteem has been decreasing over time and this thing did not help.

The only “benefit” at being like that is that I never stop pushing my own limits. The main drawbacks are that I am rarely proud of myself, never satisfied and I hardly believe people’s kind words. Such feelings do not mean that I am unhappy or sad or even depressed. It rather means: I cannot even think about the Impostor syndrome because I would fail to qualify as an impostor… That is a bit annoying but it is not the end of the world.

For example, according to my manager and the outcome of the projects I have worked on this year, I perform very well at my current company. Self-esteem does not prevent one to get things done, take initiatives or create amazing things. Yet, having little self-esteem forced me to put “according to” in the previous sentence. And that is actually the problem.

When I want to blog, I usually stop because (1) I do not have anything interesting to write, (2) I do not know enough or (3) no one cares about my thoughts. When I was younger, I was probably too bold to think about all of this but sharing my (sometimes imprecise) knowledge was still immensely positive. That is why, as of now, I will try to write again.

I like Julia Evans’ blog and the way she writes. It is “more of a live-blogged exploration of a topic than an explanation of the topic” to quote someone else describing her style. I would like to write shorter articles more often. I would like to write about how I work and also about all the (technical) topics I am interested in. This plan should likely address my concerns (1) and (2). As for (3), I have been reading so many different blogs about all kinds of things that my upcoming articles will eventually be useful to someone else, I believe.

Let’s send a SIGCONT to this blog!