I don’t remember what I was doing this time last year, but I keep a journal, and according to my entry for that day I was having an absolutely miserable time being unemployed and hating being around my family. That state would continue until mid-March, when I finally landed a job, and switched from being miserable about being unemployed to being slightly less miserable about being employed.

After begging and pleading the universe to just give me a job, any fucking job that pays, please pretty please, it delivered a historic fuck you: Here you go! It’s an AI startup based in the pariah country, hope you enjoy! It was the only offer I received before the moratorium on student debt payments was lifted so I had no choice. I’d take the job until I could find another one, I swore to myself, and grimly saddled up and returned to the 12+ hour a day startup grind. I have yet to find another job since pretty much every tech job hiring right now is also AI or defense work.

Early in the year, before I returned to work, I had been spending most of my days when I wasn’t job hunting doing meticulous setups and deep dives of every tiling and vintage-looking Linux desktop environment and window manager that I could find. I was working on wm2 and TWM when I went back to work and I didn’t pick them back up again, sadly. I hope to return to the project sometime after the new year but my calendar is already stacking up.

The summer is a blur; I had to travel to REDACTED and started learning Kotlin, which I found surprisingly enjoyable. Kubernetes also started playing a big role in my life. Thanks to the miracle of receiving a salary I was able to pay off my accursed student loans but due to being stuck in the middle of nowhere I made no progress on the replacement job hunt. I started thinking about moving elsewhere.

In the autumn the startup grind grew in misery and I took a short vacation to Montreal and had a big private meltdown and angsted over What Next. I worried I was already back in burnout and did a lot of personal struggle sessions over what my personal crisis era had even been about if I was just going right back into the breach by doing the same shit again. I gritted my teeth and flew back home and went back to work figuring at least being able to pay the bills was better than weeping into my journal about how I couldn’t pay the bills.

I spent most of October and November either seething, looking for another job, or doing shitty early-stage startup hustle, while simultanously telling myself I just had to ride this out until I could move or find another job, but I definitely couldn’t move yet, no ma’am, no moving is possible now, What If You Lose Your Job, What If You Run Out Of Money, Better Save At Least Ten Thousand More, on and on and on. I didn’t leave the house, I just seethed and worked and basted in my own fury. It was unpleasant.

In December I snapped and decided I was done seething, I was going to move somewhere I had better chances of landing another job if necessary and where I could walk to a goddamn grocery store and buy tofu and gochujang without having to explain my choices to others or get in a car. For most of the month I obsessively spreadsheeted out costs associated with moving to Montreal or back to Seattle. I looked at apartments and visas and agonized over the proposed visa changes going on in Canada and wondered how serious I was about learning French and how productive I could really be with so much travel. I booked another trip to Montreal with the intention of staying there for several months to take a French class and look at apartments but then the moral hazard of needing to rent an AirBnB on top of the work I do sent me into a depressive tailspin.

I have this mode I get into when I am highly stressed that I think of as ‘scary autopilot’ where I get very erratic and prone to high-impact major life decisions with effectively very little planning or thought. It’s probably a form of mania but I never think it is in the moment since it always happens after I’ve been obsesssing over a decision for months and refusing to allow myself to move forward because of Reasons. In the moment it always feels like a crucial breaking of a major blockage, a necessary act to force myself out of analysis paralysis.

Anyway a few days ago I looked at apartments in San Francisco on a whim and found one in a part of the city that didn’t give me mugging vibes and had not one but three grocery stores in walking distance; an apartment a little larger than the two I’d been obsessing over in Seattle and Montreal; an apartment with in-unit washer/dryer and dishwasher; an apartment (regretfully?) with a fully online leasing process. And girl you know it, I applied then and there and within five minutes of the thought entering my head I was committed to moving to San Francisco in January.

Is it expensive? Yeah, sure, but it’s not that much more than what I was looking at in Seattle and I don’t have to worry about getting a car. Is it stupid? I don’t know, pretty much everything is stupid right now in America, but at least I don’t have to get a work visa before getting a job there like I do in Montreal and there are more tech jobs there than in Seattle. Is it a BAD IDEA? Well I am no longer obsessively seething over making questionable choices, having now made a questionable choice I have to live with for no less than sixteen months. For now that’s a win.

I am leaving for Montreal in two days and I’ll be there for almost two weeks, and from there I’m going directly to San Francisco. I’ll spend the first week there in a hotel while I get a bed and a desk and like, pans and plates. I will, of course, be working - I can’t take that week off because of important Meetings going on and the week after important Customer Presentations - but sometime in January I’ll be able to take a couple of days off and just, like, wallow in the thrill of being on my own again and not drowning in Problems for the first time in… uh.. seven years?

And maybe sometime after I get settled I’ll be able to return to GUI and desktop environments!