Sean Tilley

Yeah, I’m on sertraline and Adderall XR. While neither one is perfect, the baseline quality of my life has improved. It’s hard to quantify or explain, but my recall and short-term memory is a million times better. I’m currently going to school full-time, and my grades are the best they’ve ever been, even in my hardest classes.

What the actual fuck?

Most of my working adult life has involved struggling with untreated ADHD. It’s one of those things that a lot of people failed to understand, and when I’d explain my symptoms to them, they would often just say that it sounded like I was depressed, burnt out, and overburdened at work. While all of those things were true, executive dysfunction is more complicated and nuanced - for me, it manifests in the form of procrastination, seeking stimulation, and difficulty carrying a thread of consciousness from one sentence to the next. It can also mean that your self-esteem is constantly in the toilet.

In spite of this, I had a lot of success in early stage tech startups, which are often chaotic. You have to switch roles at a moment’s notice, going from customer support and technical resolution to product development and logistics. When things are on fire, customers are angry, and things are broken, I tend to be at my very best. It’s the slower, more tedious, repetitive tasks like manual data entry that I tend to struggle with. I have been forced onto Performance Improvement Plans more than a few times in my career - despite glowing performance reviews - and have never gotten off of one.

In spite of dropping out of college, I had managed to make a career for myself. I worked at a few tech startups, and had a really good reputation among my team members. As I continued to climb a corporate ladder and move to bigger and bigger companies, I found myself becoming burdened with larger responsibilities. I can accomplish anything I set my mind to, but I gradually turned myself into a workhorse for the entire team. My manager eventually saddled me with an enormous task where I had to develop a deeply technical presentation from scratch and give it to a live audience of over 300 engineers. To be clear - no such resource had ever been developed within the company. I guess this stemmed from me rewriting so much of the documentation so that ordinary people could understand it?

I did the best I could. I solicited advice from just about every department in the company, rewrote the whole thing several times over, and practiced my presentation in front of my manager over and over again, as they nitpicked every aspect of it. Presentation day finally came, it ended up being a huge success. For me, this was a massive accomplishment. Unfortunately, my work performance had been languishing in other areas, and I once again ended up on a PIP. My manager drove the team into the ground, and I tried to make the case that I was just about done with being treated this way.

I ended up in an HR meeting that I thought was initially being done to hash out our differences and find a path forward, but it was actually just the company kicking me out. I got a severance package, struggled for months to apply for a new job, faced a ton of rejections and self-sabotage. I smoked pot and got drunk until I had to sell all of my belongings just to survive, and then had to move back across the country to live with my dad and apply for the military. Four years later, I’m married, going to school full-time, and living a pretty okay life as a veteran.

Yeah, the election results were a horrible thing to wake up to. I had really hoped for a better outcome, but this is the direction America decided to go.

The biggest thing to remember right now is that the progressive cause will always have work to do, and challenges to face. Even if we had won, either partially or by a landslide in the House, Senate, and Executive branch, that would still hold true. The American Right may very well unleash new horrors that make life intolerable for absolutely everyone, and may take up policies that get people killed. Now, more than ever, it is on us to build bridges and networks of support. All we have to do is outlive these bastards, and oppose their worst tendencies at every turn. Vote early, vote often, and vote locally.

In the coming days and weeks, pundits will likely try to highlight all the possible reasons that the Harris campaign failed, because they love sounding like informed geniuses who take a result, work backwards, and highlight what should have been done. Try not to lean into the tendency to blame people on the left, and try to avoid infighting. It’s going to happen.

I used to work with enterprise customers at a SaaS company, and still have a lot of anger in how corporate types use this fluffy language. I think my “favorite” example of this jargon is “Please Advise.”, which basically just means “What the fuck?!”

I was working at a tool checkout in my shop for a while, and the sheer amount of ignorance and repetition blew me away.

People would come in, see signs stating things like “Don’t throw your hazardous waste in this trash can!”, and people would straight up ignore it. Things got so bad that we had to stop offering a trash can in our part of the shop.

A lot of people would also just repeat the same statements, day after day, week after week. For example, we have iPads that contain maintenance manuals. We have to update those manuals every week, on the same day. Without fail, the same people always forget which day Update Day is, and have to ask.

The worst ones happen when people come to turn in their gear before end of shift. Most people are fine, but every toolbox has to be thoroughly inspected before being scanned back in. Often, somebody misplaced a tool, left garbage in the box somewhere, or there’s some other undocumented discrepancy.

Most people are cool about it, and willing to make things right. But, some people act like you’ve purposely screwed them over, or react with total apathy and disrespect. I don’t make the rules, man, I’m just trying to do my job.

Thank you. ❤️ I know, and I’m doing my best. It’s just my first real experience of dealing with any of this as an adult, and I don’t think I’ve ugly cried harder in my life.

I’m about to fly East next week, to bury my grandfather. I think it will be good for me, but it hurts to let go of someone that so many of my happy memories stemmed from.

It’s also a horrifying thought to me that this is the logical conclusion of “growing old with someone”. One of you is going to go first, and it’s going to be the worst pain the other person has ever felt.

I’m a trainwreck right now.

My grandfather suddenly passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer, multiple strokes, and COVID. It was brutal, he was in so much pain for months. What really hurts is that he was a wonderful person, a source of great joy and insight, and most definitely the person who got me into computers at a young age. My youngest coherent memories are of him, and the loss is exceedingly painful.

My stepfather pointed a loaded gun at my autistic little brother and basically kicked him to the street. My little brother has had his fair share of problems with holding down any kind of job, and can barely take care of himself. He was kicked out of a shelter for a messy living space, and living out of a tent next to a YMCA.

My mom was living in fear for a while, as my stepdad increasingly became more paranoid and violent, to the point that she was no longer allowed to talk to us on the phone if he came home. She managed to give him the slip and take the kids with her to go take care of the grandfather on the other side of the country…but, she’s in for a messy divorce.

These three things have kind of converged, and a lot of it is starting to resolve finally, but it’s been a massive strain on my mental health and my marriage. I’m barely taking care of myself most of the time, and trying to live with anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation…and all of the fun side effects of trying to treat those things with therapy and medication.

I’m so tired. I’m barely eating. I have six months left in a maintenance squadron before I get out of the military, and all I want to do is scream.

Okay. I’m glad that the situation is looking better, and it’s probably more on the Ubuntu people than the Gnome people, but it’s still an incredibly shitty experience.

The one that really irks me now is that Nautilus in Ubuntu doesn’t show thumbnails for PNG images in the file selection dialog. It’s such an ass-backwards change that I’m legitimately shocked.