It's hard to imagine it's been 4 months since my original post, in a sense it feels like it has been much longer than that.

I received a lot of support and encouragement from Hacker News, at a difficult time, and I felt now was a good time to give an update to the community that helped me move forward from then.

Because of the encouragement I got, the very next morning I approached my manager and told them the truth. I told them about my depression, the problems with motivation it has been causing. And in the end, that kept me from losing my job immediately.

I also went to see a therapist, and that ended up being one of the most important steps out of my situation. He supported me no matter how bleak things seemed and helped me keep myself accountable even when I lacked the motivation to complete basic tasks.

Because I had mentioned depression, my work wanted a doctor to fill out forms detailing my depression as a disability. However, I hadn't been to a doctor in years. My physician wasn't able to fill out the forms, the therapist didn't have enough history to fill it out, and so for a few more weeks, I went back and forth between sources trying to get it filled out.

But eventually, my work had enough, understandably. My lateness had barely improved, and now I was additionally distracted by the burden of thinking on any given day I'd be called in and fired.

One day, about a month and a half later, it happened. I remember I had asked for a day off midweek and didn't get a response from my manager, and suspecting something was wrong. The next day I was sat down in front of the CEO and the closest person we had to HR.

I remember feeling frustration, anger, and even guilt in the first few moments I realized I was being fired. But by the time I got to my car I felt free.

Fortunately, I had been searching for work before that day, my therapist had helped me realize, part of my depression was from feeling the job was inadequate. It involved minimal effort and had failed to fulfill what I was looking for when I left my last position, namely working with a team (it started as a 3 person dev team and by the time I left it was just me and my manager).

So the day I had asked off for was actually to travel to a final interview. It was difficult being fired on a Tuesday and flying off to an interview on a Thursday, but I knew that I had to make it work. In the state I was in, restarting the process at another company would have been too draining, and I'd really be in a difficult position.

The interview went well, the company was everything I was looking for, demanding work with a proven track record for caring about developer wellbeing, a strong team that would help me grow as a developer, and I was a good fit. My flight home hadn't landed before I got the good news that I would be getting an offer.

At this point, I realize the post has gone on for a bit so I'll skip over some of the details. The job was about 1000 miles away from where I lived, so I was given a month to move. It was a difficult month and I regret how I spent it in retrospect. My savings had already been wiped out by a car accident, so I spent a month not paying bills, moping at home, and my depression got to the worst it had been in years.

But as the day I had to move came around I knew I had to do something, and somehow I rallied myself and made it to the job.

The position has been great, I love the company and my coworkers, and they have entirely "walked the walk" to all the great things I heard about their approach to development and treating employees.

I can't say everything is perfect, but that's life. And things are better.

I've put off finding a new therapist and psychiatrist because of the same catch-22 that was affecting me earlier, being depressed removing my motivation, but writing this post and reliving the last few months has reminded me that nothing good will come of continuing that.

My finances were a mess before, but I think I hit a new bottom. My parents had to loan me money pay rent and bills, and while I'm incredibly grateful to them and feel somewhat selfish for saying this, it didn't help my psyche. Suddenly my sense of agency is affected realizing despite making as much as I was for as long as I was, I was literally one paycheck away from having to depend on my parents.

I'll add the experience has taught me a lot.

Before this ordeal, I was naive in my views of money. I always felt there'd be time to save later, that saving is for the long-term. But I can't imagine how much better my mental health would have been if I could have left the company on my own terms. If that last month hadn't been spent panicking about bills and rent. I'll never look at savings the same way again, and even now I'm trying to find freelance gigs to catch up on all my unpaid bills.

It also made me appreciate the power of having someone to talk to.

My post 4 months ago is why I'm here today. It's the singular action that pushed me to talk to my work, to talk to a therapist, and eventually to talk to my parents. The truth is it's easy to hole yourself up when you reach a dark enough place, but sometimes staying silent is its own torture. Even talking to my creditors instead of ignoring their calls helped, often times they were more sympathetic to my situation than I would have ever imagined.

I've written a wall of text, and in some ways, it's exhausting to write about those times again, so I'll end this here, with a thank you once again to this community for helping me find my way. I hope one day I can find a way to pass it on, but until then I'll continue to take all the support I've been given forward.