Starting therapy next week

Next week I’m going to start mental therapy with a psychologist. It’s been 4 years since I last went to therapy, and I think it’s time to go back and do a regular checkup. 2023 was a year of many challenges in my life:

• Shopify fired me in May along with many other colleagues, many of whom happened to live in a country, Germany, where people were organizing to unionize. This was a moment of disappointment for me towards a company that I admired and that I thought was doing things right. I felt lied to and betrayed. After this experience, I looked at other companies with a different lens and a lot of skepticism. Luckily I came across the Hacking Capitalism book, which taught me a lot about what no one teaches you about capitalism and how to navigate it.
• My wife was fired too from Shopify. She’s a localization program manager, and she’s not as lucky as we still are in the software industry. Everyone is questioning the value of localization in the industry due to AI advancements. She loves languages and would like to continue working on that space, but seeing her suffering and feeling lost is hard for me. It’s unfair, but once again, capitalism is not fair.
• I decided to focus on Tuist full-time and turn it into a business. Some organizations received this transition well, while others didn’t. In particular, Bitrise, who was trying to profit from the work we’d done for years without contributing anything back, decided to publish a web page to rant about the project and me as one of the maintainers of the project. Once again, capitalism is in its purest form. If you do things altruistically, you are cool, but if you try to make a living out of it, you are a bad person. I’m not going to lie; it hurt me a lot. I felt like I was being bullied, and I didn’t know how to react. I felt powerless. Luckily, I was surrounded by many people, including my wife and Marek, who understood the situation and helped me to get through it.
• I won’t lie, trying to turn Tuist into a business puts a question in my head every day: will it work? I have enough savings to not worry about money for a while, but still, I can’t stop thinking about it. An impostor syndrome is growing inside me, and I don’t know how to stop it. I’m trying to be rational and think about the facts, but it’s hard. I used to have more confidence in myself, but since all the Shopify stuff, I feel like I’m not good enough. Crazy, isn’t it? Even if it doesn’t work, I’m sure I’ll learn a lot, and I can always go back to a full-time job and help organizations that are struggling with their Xcode projects.
• My mother and sisters are going through a rough time mentally caused by a toxic relationship with the family business, which is dominated by patriarchy and slavery practices. I knew it’d happen sooner or later, and tried my best to prevent it, but there are many big elephants in my family’s room that no one talks about to avoid conflicts. They prefer conflict avoidance, even if they know that will result in a much larger conflict. My mother was the first one to break down after more than 20 years, of working without any salary adjustment and 7 days a week non-stop. I’d like to build a source of income to retire her and my father and put a hard stop to this situation. The part of the family that benefits from this situation, which includes my uncle and my grandmother, doesn’t want to see me around because I bring the whole setup into instability. They don’t want me to speak up. This was a rough way for me to end the year.

Will 2024 look better? I don’t know. I hope. For now I’m going to talk to a psychologist about it and get some help to cope with these situations.