So, these days I am pretty exhausted. I would like to put a sign on my head saying "Closed due to restoration works".

The best husband I could ever hope for had to do a lot of handholding today.

Weirdly, when I reach panic stage and break out in tears, that is a good sign. There's something about the panic that seems to wake me up, prevent me from sliding further into a depressive state.

It is very late now, and I should go to bed. And I will, soon.

It was yesterday that I started to see my current unravelling as a chance. "Sometimes, to come to your senses, you have to lose your mind." There are some things I kept glossing over in the past months, and that was fine. But not good in the long run. On a very practical level, my brain child and big attention hogger, CodeHub, is bumbling along, and a lot of things are not working that well. People promise sponsoring money and keep postponing, and Digital Ocean bizarrely did not reply to two emails after having offered us a credit of $250. I am putting some of my own money in now. I am actually planning to inject a big wadge soon, from money I have in Germany (yay, best time now with the current exchange rate).

And that is in a way the easy bit. But underlying is some confusion about what is objectively good about what we do, and about what we can ask sponsoring money for.

And still, even that.. Now, what bothers me most is how I started various things, or talked about starting them, coaches at hack night, opening a library for which I have written a Django app that I've now more or less abandoned. And then it is all dragging along. Oh, there's also the mentoring program.

I have doubts about how useful all of these things are. Some of them, people seem enthusiastic. But not to a point where they would really help with them. And I don't blame them, I'd probably not do that either.

And then what I have more doubts about is my ability to run them. I do things with no credentials whatsoever, on top of that I am not very organised, and the worst, I am both not an advanced programmer and (I have finally come round to that) also suffering from impostor syndrome, probably massively. I mean, in principle you cannot really say you suffer from impostor syndrome. Because when you have it, you are absolutely convinced you are an impostor. How can you know it's a syndrome?

There is something that has been missing for so so long. Self-reliance. And this, this is where the problem with (internalised!) misogyny lies for me. Some women are okay, they've had an affirmative, encouraging environment. I don't exactly know how it happened to me. As a child I was cocky(!) about being smart, and had zero social skills. But of course that was not allowed, and especially the women in my life would not have it. There was such a strong message of having to be modest, putting everybody else's needs in front of your own, be SERVING. I was never able to comply very well, but have learned some social skills like a second language, because I had to.

The thing is, not all of what I have learned as desired female behaviour is bad. Not at all, in fact. It is so easy to complain. I can mostly speak okay to people now and it might be that I look better after people than I otherwise would have. Don't know.

But the one aspect of having been 'knocked into shape' in this way (I suspect that's where it comes from) that I find really deplorable is this: I find it so difficult to say "I can do this", "I am good at this", "This is something I know". And this has an accumulative effect over time. You just never get anywhere. It is pretty bizarre. The clinical depressions I had in my 20s didn't help with that, either. Nor did the Asperger traits I have.

So what I am wondering now: How much can I do about it at my age?? I have a pretty good idea about how 'off' my assumptions are, how distorted my view of things. But that doesn't undo the effects of bad habits over years, and does not prevent me from falling into bad thinking patterns. But it could be a start?!

I want to deliberately tackle this. And it is not selfish. Because the better I get at this, the better able I will be to help other people, and perhaps women especially?

4 am now. I hope it will not affect my whole week now. But I don't have to go to work tomorrow, at least something.

Before I finish, another thing I have come round to: To embrace weirdness, and to let it be on this blog, too. Most developers write about technical things on there blogs. Well, I just don't. At least not for now. There is also this quote by Joss Wheedon: "Whatever makes you weird is probably your greatest asset"