Work(s) In Progress

Roughly six months ago, I first wrote about how I’d been dealing with some personal stuff over the last couple of years, and how this had ended in a heartbreaking break-up of a relationship that I thought would last a lifetime. After almost twelve years, I had to say goodbye to the person I loved the most, and found myself lost, loveless and alone.

I wrote about what exactly had gone down and the measures I was taking to get out of this horrible, painful situation I found myself in. Since another half year has passed, it is time for a little update. The news is that I have been… okay, but there is a lot of work that remains to be done. I have certainly been busy, I have not skipped a day of progress.

While I reached a great fitness target last year (getting fit!) I have made additional progress over the last six months, something I’m quite proud about and I will happily share below. I have also made preliminary plans for big life changes in the next two years, but more on that later.

Current Focus Areas

As far as the short term is concerned, I have been focusing on four key areas. The first two ones were established earlier last year:

• Fixing fitness: continued training to improve physique
• Fixing skills: daily coding to improve coding skills

These two ones are newer:

• Fixing social: getting in touch with (old) friends more frequently & visiting them
• Fixing sleep: attempting to fix bad bed habits

The point of focus areas is simple: inspired by Atomic Habits, I want to do something every day to improve these focus areas. I have also noticed that I have been thinking about confronting more difficult issues — more on that later.

Okay, let’s start with the failures.

Where I Failed

There’s a saying that goes something like this:

”Success is stumbling from failure to failure
with no loss of enthusiasm” Winston Churchill

I’m not entirely sure that this was actually said by Churchill (many like to attribute random quotes to well-known historical figures to give credence to the legitimacy of the quote, after all) but I do appreciate the idea behind it.

It had been a while since I attempted to really learn something new, so I had lost sight of the fact that when you’re starting out doing something new, you’re going to fail. A lot.

Fixing Sleep

After the painful breakup, I spent many weeks processing all that had happened. My sleep, which was already pretty bad prior to the breakup, didn’t get any better: I slept about an average of 4 to 5 hours every night. I spent many nights up until 4 AM until I eventually passed out from exhaustion.

To this day, sleeping isn’t always as easy as I want it to be (sometimes my brain wants to have some fun). Sometimes I wake up because of nightmares.

It’s taken me a long time, but I’m finally making some moves to ensure I can get this fixed. Lately, I’ve been trying my best at making sure I get into bed on time: no more crawling in bed at 3 AM because I think I won’t be able to sleep.

The plan is simple:

• Wake up earlier (duh!)
• Go to bed earlier (duh!)
• Change evening and morning routines (duh!)

Lots of duh-worthy stuff here. But the truth is, I lacked the discipline to properly do this before. I can be a bit of a night owl, still. All of the fitness and recent lifestyle changes — including focusing on just me have been very beneficial in building up my discipline, though.

If needed, I end up reading myself to sleep: I finished a few books so far¹, and recently I started reading Elantris, Brandon Sanderson’s first published novel.² Sometimes I just pass out from exhaustion. It generally doesn’t matter, I aim to head to bed on time. It must be done.

Fixing Social

I have been traveling a bunch, visiting old friends, mostly. I haven’t been busy making new friends, and I most certainly haven’t been dating. Probably better to start doing that later down the line, once I’ve got some of this other stuff fixed.

An introvert like me will have a hard enough time with this stuff as-is, no need to hurry and meet new people until I feel a bit better about who I am and what I look like. Eventually I might need to go see a therapist for this stuff, I reckon. I, uh, took a lot of damage to the self-confidence department after what went down last year.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the idea of dating. Folks will bring it up. “Do you think you’re ready to start dating again?” Bitch, please. I may never be.

To be honest, seeing a therapist might be a good idea before I attempt dating again. I’ve seen what Tinder can do to men, and it ain’t pretty. A man like me, who is neither tall nor incredibly handsome, is certainly not going to get many matches, let me tell you. I don’t even need to install the app to know that. Since I live in the middle of bumfuck nowhereville, I don’t get to meet many new people. I also don’t have any particular interest in new extracurricular activities. I’m the definition of the most boring guy ever, at least if my ex was to believed.

I’ll see what I do when I get there, but I’ll likely avoid dating apps like the plague. I figure the best thing I can do for future me is get the basics down pat again: work on myself, be steady in life and meet new people here and there. We’ll see what happens. Here’s one thing I can promise you I won’t do: hit on a colleague who’s already taken. For obvious reasons. (I’m a better man than that.)

Okay, enough about potential dating — I consider that a problem for Future Nico, who has moved into an apartment or something. My current living situation isn’t very amenable to romantic engagements, to be frank.

For now, I’ll embrace being content by my lonesome self. Uh, while hanging out with friends every now and then, of course. Can’t be alone all the time! That being said, I do need to meet some new people… Try doing that when you’re almost thirty — no one has time! My friend circle is quite small and after the end of such a long relationship I lost my entire extended family as well.

In a recent chat with a friend who went through divorce, we both acknowledged that we would never want to be in a relationship again where we invest so much of ourselves into the relationship.

When I was still in that relationship, I believed that it meant total surrender, as in: put all of yourself into it, or it will not succeed. It means that you fight until the bitter end. Even when it got hard, I was willing to face the fact that we are all only human. But some lines cannot be crossed. Acknowledging all of this, I find it hard to believe I might ever love the same after this.

I haven’t even mentioned that I now feel horribly behind since I decided to postpone various aspects of my life due to relationship concerns throughout my twenties. While I have been working professionally for about eight years now, I still live at home, I have never had to do much of this stuff on my own.

(Yes, I am aware that ‘everyone does things at their own pace’, I’ve heard the spiel before. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop me from feeling positively awful when I see someone my age announcing a birth, marriage or celebrating a milestone with their loved one. It makes me want to just crawl into a hole and vanish.)

I feel like a little baby about to put his first steps out there in the big wide world, and at the same time I’ll be thirty next year. What the actual fuck happened? How did I not see life passing me by? Sure, the pandemic and such put life on hold, but I’d say I wasted away at least four or five years this way.

I have a lot of growing to do in this department.

Where I Succeeded

Enough doom and gloom. All right, let’s talk progress. Because while I might find that I have not made enough progress, I should be slightly more patient. It’s only been 11 months, right? It’s pretty damn hard to turn your life around if you’re still grieving over who you used to be.

Fixing Fitness

On December 31st, 2021 I weighed in at roughly 72 kg, roughly ten kilos lighter than when I started that year.

That’s a whole bucket of fat that I no longer need to carry around. Think about that! I actually went and grabbed a bucket and proceeded to fill it up. Then, I tried to walk around the house. Now obviously, if you’re actually fat, the weight is more evenly distributed and walking around is easier. That being said, a full bucket is heavy.³

So, since last year? Well, I have lost even more weight: I now recently weighed in at exactly 65 kg! This was actually my end-of-year goal, but I’ve already reached it. That’s almost two buckets now — yes, I certainly weigh two buckets less if you take my average weight prior to last year, which was ~85 kg.

I simply cannot overstate the impact this change has had on my overall health and fitness. Not only do I sleep better, I feel more energetic, various cardiovascular problems have ceased to exist, and I look better, too. No more triple chin: at worst, it’s a double chin now at the wrong angle, like most normal people, you see!

I’ve actually kept one pair of jeans and one large T-shirt around from back in the day, and I put these oversized rags on every now and then, just to remind myself of where I’ve come from. Then, I remember that it’s only been like 11 months or so… and then I am simply proud. I’ve done well so far.

I do not intend to lose much more weight, since there’s a risk of suffering from body dysmorphia at a certain point.

Fixing Skills

I’ll be honest: I was not particularly pleased with my current skills as a developer. I felt as if I’d gotten rusty over the last couple of years, I felt the same kind of problem I had in my private life also applied to my career: I’d gotten complacent.

Here I was, working the same job I’ve always worked. Having the same issues at work I’d been having for years now. Not having enough time to learn new stuff. Not experimenting enough. Not taking on new challenges.

It was time for some change, but it was clear to me that this change could not come from within my current work environment. I think I’m burned out on traditional agency work after almost eight years of doing this. It’s time for some change. When I have more to announce about that, I’ll let you all know.

In the meantime, I have been working a lot on a little tool called PHP Monitor, which blew up last year on April 1st immediately before the death throes of my relationship. (What a joke, eh?) I work on that frequently, but since my time writing code is limited strictly to post-work time, the progress is steady, but slow.

In an ideal world, I would have used that energy and the timing to do something with that popularity boost. Unfortunately, this didn’t end up working out. Nonetheless, I am grateful for all of the attention, love and donations that the tool has graced me with.

By the end of last year, I had recovered a little bit from the emotional distress, so I spent more time working on the app. I have been releasing frequent updates now, and I’m pretty happy to say that I’ve now reached 1900 stars on GitHub!

Surviving Infidelity

I found a place where my past was forgiven
Where my mistakes met a grace I couldn’t earn
And so piled up my excuses and defenses in the night
I lit a match, stepped back and watched ’em burn Carry Me
by NEEDTOBREATHE & Jon Foreman

I mentioned various goals so far, but there’s one thing I haven’t mentioned: the status of my mental health.

If you read the segment on my social life, you probably know where this is going. In short? I am still healing, and still reeling. It remains rough: I have plenty of shattered memories of a life together with a person who decided that our relationship wasn’t worth fighting for any longer.

This person decided to go behind my back and tried to find what she found lacking in our relationship somewhere else. The fact that there was a man who helped facilitate this, knowing she was already in a relationship, trying to push her subtly into a particular direction with carefully phrased language (I read some of the messages!) made me feel sick. I felt this was incredibly manipulative. Then she started mentioning his “puppy dog eyes” and how she felt “so safe with him” and I was about ready to jump off a bridge.

I struggled with this for weeks leading up to the breakup. She could and would not distance herself from this person. While she claimed she did, she did not. What broke my heart was the lies, the evasion, even some gaslighting. I am definitely not perfect and we had problems in our relationship (like all relationships) but I did not deserve this treatment.

All of those memories, good and bad, have been cast in a new light. Most of those happy memories are now null and void, because they are a confirmation of a simple idea: I have peaked, and it’s all the way downhill from here. It’s a ten-year plus period of time. You don’t just cast that aside. Overnight, ten plus years of happiness has turned into a constant reminder of my failure.

What are the odds I will be able to reproduce the positive aspects of that relationship to the degree I would want to? How much of that relationship was even a success, if it all failed in the end?

There’s not a day I haven’t thought about her. It all still weighs heavily on me. I do my best to handle it all in a graceful and positive way, but it is a challenge.

I understand now why folks want to run away from their past, or why they want to drink themselves into a state where none of it matters after all. I get it. I understand now why some men (or women), lacking any kind of support network, end up killing themselves because they feel like they have no future.

I see no benefit to such destructive behaviour, so I just let it all these emotions crash into me, and I just hope that I’ll be left standing when the waves stop coming, or at least when their intensity has reached its peak. It’s really hard to bear at times, though.

I obviously decided to end that relationship, but I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I lost that one person who I considered to be an equal, a person whose wisdom, intelligence and beauty I respected and treasured for over a decade.

Sadly, it took only a moment to destroy all the trust I had in her — it was the worst feeling ever. To feel something irreparably shatter. The sheer disappointment and absolute disgust on my part is hard to describe.

In the beginning, I described this loss to friends like it was as if one of my limbs had been suddenly blown off. It was all so sudden, painful — traumatic.

I was wrong, that was simply the initial shock. There was a silver lining to this analogy: if you’ve been repeatedly stabbed in a limb and it gets blown off, you’re no longer getting stabbed.⁴

So, in retrospect it’s probably not like have a limb blown off: the actual damage is much more profound, and often quite invisible. If you walk past me on the street, you won’t see what is in my mind’s eye. You won’t remember what I remember. If you’ve ever really loved someone before, I’m sure this sounds familiar.

Instead, the absence of this person in my life manifests itself in various different ways. The easiest comparison I could make is to say that it feels like there’s this huge void… inside. This void feels wrong in every way, but eventually you make your peace… or so they tell me.⁵

As far as direct, noticeable impacts go? Honestly? Any and all self-confidence I had was blown to smithereens. What was my value, after all, if I couldn’t keep the person I treasured most, by my side? I must certainly be dumb, pathetic, stupid, ugly… right?

I called myself all sorts of names. I hated myself, and was disgusted by who I believed I was, what I looked like. It was a tour of destruction and self-loathing that was absolutely disgusting and pathetic, in hindsight.

This particular rodeo is one I do not recommend you repeat often: constantly fighting your inner critic always means that you lose, even when you win (since you are both parties in these particular, unwinnable disputes).

If you feel a spike of emotions that are destructive in nature, analyze them. Find out where your insecurities lie. Assess them. Address them. Or maybe even… accept them. No one is flawless.

I have accepted that this trite reasoning is one of the reasons I initially felt so disgusted by myself. I gave myself a single shot, and my failure meant that there was no chance for me to ever find love again.

This idea of having just one shot at things is, obviously, a bad way to think about it. I am not only worthy of being loved, I am also still capable of loving someone else, too. I sometimes need to tell myself that this is true. Even at thirty.⁶

Eventually I’ll end up believing it too. (I sure fucking hope so.)

So yes: I wish I could tell you that I speak now from a place of emotional stability, but the truth is that I am a work in progress.

Maybe it’s all I’ll ever be.

Maybe, in some beautiful way, that’s all we ever are, isn’t it?

Works in progress.