On failing to live up to one’s self-image

I’m good at what I do.

I can take badly-designed applications apart and put them back together again in ways that work. I can rebuild tools, make them faster and more flexible and easier to understand. I’m one of the ten percent of coders who do ninety percent of the work, and do it faster, and do it better. I can make it pretty and functional, at the same time. And I know it’s true, not just an inflated ego, because people keep paying me absurd amounts of money to do it. And because jobs keep falling into my lap. And because companies with the pick of the talent in their large cities make special allowances to hire this eccentric who lives in the woods. And most of all because I own the room in meetings. I, who am so bad at public speaking that I could barely manage to stutter out “I love you guys” as my best man speech at yaoobruni and kassrachel’s wedding, can walk unprepared into a room full of smart strangers, look at what they’ve spent the last five years building, see immediately what’s wrong with it, and can get them to agree. The only way that’s possible is if I’m good at what I do.

Except, lately, not so much.

I’m at the tail end of two full days spent staring at this fucking screen, glumly twiddling dropshadows and border colors and getting up from the desk to pace around the house every ten minutes, grimly aware that the real work is completely undone and I have no ideas and I’m going to hit monday’s deadline with nothing to show for it. And this is on the tail end of three or four weeks of more or less the same. I don’t miss deadlines. I’ve never missed deadlines. This will make two in a month.

What’s so frustrating about this is that, by every measure I’ve a right to expect, this should be a dream job. I know the product category backwards and forwards. It’s a small but established company: no startup madness, no corporate drones. The boss is a great guy, was a real mentor to me early in my career, knows that I know what I’m doing and trusts me to do it. The company has decided to base their entire sales pitch on not being the most feature-rich, or the cheapest, or the most scaleable, but on having the best user interface. They’re committed to a complete rewrite of the product to that end. I’m the sole designer of that user interface; I report only to the boss. And I’m working on the phase of the project that should be the most fun: the blue-sky prototype, where you can put in all the good ideas without having to worry about code dependencies and version migration and 508-compliance and schedule realities.

And I’m stuck. Just stuck.

There are some frictions, of course, some resistance to change in the company and some people who don’t get it, but all in all they’re relatively minor. The only way it could be a better job, literally the only way I could have more freedom and control to do what I do, is if I was building it on my own, went entreprenurial and started my own company. And I tried that earlier this year, or told myself I was trying it, and spent six months accomplishing, basically, nothing. Coding myself in circles, or more often not at all.

I’m stuck.

I’m not being the person I thought I was. I don’t know if it’s burnout, or laziness, or if I’ve used up my talent, or if I’ve been doing the wrong thing all this time and have just been coasted along on inertia, but whatever it is, I’m stuck. I’m sitting here in my shorts typing a confessional into a fer chrissakes livejournal page, instead of getting my work done. That’s not me.

I’m dangerously close to quitting this job. I could. I’d have done so already, except that I consider the boss a friend as well as an employer, and don’t want to disappoint him. And, more importantly, because I have no fucking idea what I would do with myself afterwards.

(That’s not true, I know exactly what I’d do next: I’d sit here skimming blogs and drinking too much and playing warcraft until I finally get bored with it, which could be a couple months, and then I’d have to face this again but in midwinter. Which, you know me. That’s not going to help. Bad enough to deal with this when the world is its own true size; impossible when the house is shrunk by closed windows and snowdrifts and the sun shrunk by distance and my body shrunk and stiffened by the cold... no. I dread winter and I don’t understand how you people can possibly look forward to it and I never will. But that’s another story.)

And, most importantly, because I’d be ashamed of myself. I didn’t know I had this much pride. And I’m worried now that I’m not as good at what I do as I think I am. I’m thirty four years old and I’m not even sure I know what I do. And given how long I’ve been doing it, that’s pretty appalling.

I don’t know what to do. I just know this, what I’m doing now, isn’t working. I’ve got to do something. I just don’t know what.