my brain is hanging upside down

For the first time in my life, I found myself in the need to take a leave of absence from my work. I had been struggling with the “cracks” in my life, feeling very out of inspiration and motivation at work, being not very loving to my wife and extremely short tempered with my daughter N. Happily (for me) my D's understanding and N's love seem infinite, but I want to be a better husband, a better dad and last (and least) again a good professional.

I've been using an analogy that if my life is a car and the cracks are in the tires, I've been trying for the past years to fix them with the car running. It's not only (almost) impossible, but unproductive as well. So the car has to stop for repair. Considering that my life is composed of 3 pillars, namely: self, family and work, two of them can't be stopped at all (self and family, just to make clear my priorities). Work is the only one of those pillars that can be put aside for some time while I heal.

Once I saw the cracks, and went through to find my pillars, it was not only obvious, but actually refreshing to decide that I needed this break. Happily we're living in a country and I'm working in a company where this is not seen in a negative light (like it is in my native country Brazil, for example). Everything is being aligned, employer is aware, family is supportive and self is full of hope!

So that's how I started by leave of absence. I hope this will help me in my healing process and that I come back stronger, mind and body.

P.S.: the order of the pillars is intentional. I actually consider family more important than self, but I follow the air travel principle of “put your mask first before helping others”, which seems to make sense for this case!

Well, I have been wanting to write a blog for many years already... I am a computer engineer by formation, a software engineer by occupation and a writer by illumination. First thing I remember about writing is how much I hated writing when I was at junior school. By the end of high school this started to change, and when I went to the university I was quite an avid writer, though of course I never shared that writing with anyone.

A couple of years ago, when we discovered that my wife was pregnant, I decided to handwrite a journal about it and it was so exciting that in a couple of weeks I finished the first notebook, but N was born before I could finish the second notebook. And then I took a very very long hiatus from writing... being parent to a baby girl with zero network of support is tough and time consuming, but a couple of days ago, when my mind was about to explode, I sat and wrote again. And the idea of blogging returned.

Besides parenting, in 2023 I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. That alone caused some quakes in my life, which was amended with some therapy. Some medications made my mental state degrade considerably, and when I found a good one, many cracks were exposed in my neurological, mental and emotional health. I've been thinking about blogging also as a way to express these feelings, hoping that it will help me find balance and reduce the load on a (hopefully currently) not very capable mind.