Back in 2020 I could very well have been the Pete in this story. I was struggling so bad with mental health issues, financial issues. On top of that, my father was giving the figh to prostatic cancer. I was just starting working remotely for the first time for a Canadian company. My employers were the nicest guys I have ever meet online and I was thrilled to have been asked to work for them as a software developer. At first I felt relieved because I finally landed in a job to do things I like using the tools I like with great people. Even though I desperately needed money, I was willing to work on a dime just to prove myself that I was sufficiently skilled to be "one of them".

But as exciting as it felt, there was an impedance that made things so difficult for me and my brain. It rapidly started to erode my self-confidence, I began pushing so hard trying to solve every task and every little detail in the most perfect way possible and felt like I was failing at everything. I certainly was failing at one thing and it was communication. The language was a barrier (English is not my native language), and I think there might have been some kind of «cultural mismatch» at play too. In hindsight, I think my employers were also failing to read what I was writing on the wall. I let them know I was struggling with mental health issues and I think I made sufficiently clear what my struggles were. They tried to help me the best they could but kept insisting on things that were irrelevant to me. Apparently they thought maybe I was doing "just a theatre" because I was afraid of asking to renegotiate my compensation (I wasn't). That was particularly frustrating to me.

At some point, feeling like a lightning rod in the middle of a thunderstorm, I was on the brink of doing what can't be undone. I had it all planned.

Lucky me, my wife was wakeful enough to notice what was going on and helped me get out of the pit.