[tl; dr] Trying to get my life together with mental illness, looking for guidance without hating myself back into deep depression.
So, I've been trying to get my depression under control. An idea I had was to "play/pretend professional". A sort of "I'll dedicate however long I can each day towards developing project ideas and resume building a day". I'll admit, I've no idea what I'm doing, I only know that I must try something and that something needs to change. I'm attempting to adopt a growth mindset, despite my conditioning.
Goals
So I'd like to put myself in this kind of life where I can:
- handle hours and work load
- live independently and be myself
- become a contributing member, where I can do social good
Present Obstacles
When job seeking (this sound familiar to you?):
- hardly get any communication back
- there are very few positions which I can both physically reach and possibly have skill for (I can't afford to move!)
- my mental health issues can make me physically unsafe in response to some postings
- negative self talk
- toxic attitudes of the posters (even including advice posts!)
- may have lost support from insurance after outing myself
- enormous gaps on my resume
- going from being "do what I'm told" to being proactive
I'm trying not to be a victim or child, or why expose myself with asking for help? Or commit time to work to better myself? What matters to me is not fault or blame. It's what I can actually do right now. I'm not interested in "facing final judgement for my sins", but rather to grow and accept feedback, critique, and to continue that loop of growth.
What I'm Doing
I'm attempting to put together a "resume" website, where I showcase some of my work. Now I know it needs to be presentable. The ideas I've found online are concerning, since I'd like to keep it simple, easy to read, and not distracting.
Resume except here, a work in progress of course:
I'd like to do "exploratory work", and present it on the website, showing that I'm both capable of learning new tech, and skills which an employer may find useful.
My future's rather dark right now. Thanks for any guidance, and please, while I can't stop you, I ask you to consider the impact of your words. So far the community has shown a certain lack of toxicity, which I'm grateful. Thank you for reading!
Top comments (3)
Wow, quite a response. Though I can't profess to having nearly the same degree of academic success. It's quite possible that'll I'll do this for months, and never receive feedback. That's not my entire goal for doing this. I'm also doing this to stay sane, and that alone I think would make such an attempt worth it. I can absolutely fail, I know this, it's the way of things and I'd rather go down fighting.
Your mentioning of "failed to maintain my motivation" resonates with me. I've seen all kinds of these sort of "motivational" videos/images or whatever from the "harsh discipline" and the gentle "you can do it" attitudes. I've been finding that in reality what's needed is far more complex than they make it seem. For me, scheduling, "building" from just maintenance of life to doing actual work, knowing my own psychology, changing environments, trying to build habits, and so much more are far more effective.
Hopefully that makes sense, a problem which is complex and all-encompassing requiring a solution which is at least equally complex and all-encompassing seems to make sense to me. I can make like four major decisions and make myself work for two hours at most a day. As less than adequate as that is, I still believe that is something I can build off of, depression is a nasty pit to be in.
It looks like it'll be a long and winding road for me to find that entry point into professional work for me, but I'm not dead yet!
Thanks for your reply and good luck out there friend!
Okey dokey, you'll have to excuse some self-promotion in my response here.
Identifying your goals is very important step. Too many people go into the career search without much thought and it makes the task of evaluating job postings and offers almost impossible. Goals give a direction, and that is important.
I want to make something super clear about getting a job. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with your ability to do a job.
The whole job process is a mess and I recommend treating it like a separate set of skills and knowledge. An example here might help. In an interview, you might get asked to explain the Big-O of various algorithms, but on the job you'll never talk about Big-O or use an algorithm that isn't provided by a library.
All of this can be extremely depressing and traumatic.
Where I recommend people start is their resume. Not portfolio sites, github, or linkedin. The reason is that you send your resume in everywhere and people won't look at the rest until after the resume. If you're not getting interviews consistently, your resume needs work. Even without experience, you can get a resume together that gets an interview almost 100% of the time.
From there you start applying for jobs to get a lot of practice with interviews. I published an article today about how those interviews are conducted by people who aren't trained and never had to answer their own interview questions. The most common myth here is that your coding ability is what keeps you from getting an offer, and your coding ability might represent 40% or so of what is actually important.
As you get good at the interview components it still isn't a sure thing though because we have no idea what is going on inside a company when they are hiring. They don't tell us, for example, that the job posting doesn't really reflect what they need, or that someone quit recently and they're actually trying to hire for that person, or that they actually want to promote someone from within but have to interview due to policies. So even if you're really good, you might only get an offer 1 in 3 times.
I'm going to wrap up my response here, but here's what I've got for you. I write a lot of articles on here about career stuff, so look through that. I also wrote a book on how to get your first development job in less than six months, and I just (this month) launched my first online class that covers and expands the material in the book. You can find all that stuff on my bio.
Good luck, and if you need anything, contact me.