The act of planning will make you feel better. Once you start believing that you have options, the stress reduces tremendously. There’s a site called interview

The act of planning will make you feel better. Once you start believing that you have options, the stress reduces tremendously. There’s a site called interviewing.io or something like that (I have no articulation, I stumbled on it a couple weeks ago), and you can pay $100 or something to have an hour and a half interview with some FAANG engineer on whatever topics you want. The point is that there are resources all over the place to help get you out of your rut, even if you don’t have a good support system. And if a site like interviewing exists, there have got to be other resources that help with your specific issues. But at some point, you must take action. It’s hard as hell, I know. I’ve tried to kill myself five times (turns out I’m horrible at suicide!), and a lot of my issues stemmed from a fucked up relationship with work and money, and that had a massive impact on my view of self. I grew up in a household where I felt I had to perform exceptionally well to be lovable (I was worthless beyond my output; if this resonates with anyone, look into “performance based love”), and I took that into work with me, and tech is awfully hard to be perfect in, and it’s impossible to be the “best” at it, so now I’m never good enough. Eventually the walls start closing in on me, and I feel like I need to escape, but I’m terrible, so there’s no way out. I have to live in this confined and uncomfortable space because that’s what worthless people like me do. Every time I get to this point, I find the same solution: look for doors instead of focusing on the walls. Very hard to do, and even harder to keep on doing when you’ve been rejected a dozen times, but eventually a door will open, and you’ll be better off.