Thread by @sh_reya

cw: mental illness, hallucinations

today, i painfully resigned from a machine learning educational program for high schoolers that i cofounded with 3 friends (CS students).

i'm sharing my story b/c it's okay to quit things that are bad for mental health: (1/13)

the company started in a coffee shop in Palo Alto in summer 2018. "wouldn't it be cool if we could teach ML to high school kids?" one of us mentioned. "it's fairly easy to learn now, but online curricula can be too complicated."

we decided to make it happen. (2/13)

at the time, i was seriously dating someone. i didn't know it then, but the relationship was incredibly toxic. i had horrible nightmares and cried to sleep most nights. i started hallucinating events that involved my s/o, family members, and people close to me. (3/13)

of course, i love ML -- but also personally, i helped start the org because i believed if i spent more time with my closest friends and s/o (also studying ML), the mental problems would go away. i never told anyone anything about my mental problems. (4/13)

we were incredibly successful in our first year! we worked with over 100 students in the Bay Area and were cash flow positive. but the hallucinations and sleep problems got worse as the org grew. i began to resent everyone close to me for not being able to help. (5/13)

i wanted to leave in may 2019, but i never knew how. i was hallucinating events that caused me to resent my cofounders and closest friends. i saw psychiatrist after psychiatrist and was prescribed > 5 different medications in the past year. i felt so alone. (6/13)

whenever i did work, i couldn't sleep. i knew it wasn't my cofounders' fault, but i didn't know who to blame. i tried blaming my ex, who broke up w/ me when i started seeing a psychiatrist in Jan 2019, but it didn't help that he studied ML and reminded me of the org. (7/13)

to be honest, i couldn't blame anyone. the org reminded me of struggling through mental illness alone. but sometimes shit happens with no one to blame. once i scaled back my work for A4 in Sep 2019, things slowly got better. by Nov 2019, i could sleep for 8 hours at night. (8/13)

i thought i'd contribute to the org in greater capacity in 2020, but i felt too much stress and dread when thinking about the person i used to be when i started the org with my friends. i feel my brain wandering to places i don't want it to be in when i think about it. (9/13)

the reason i hadn't left before now was because the people / work weren't bad; it was just my fault i couldn't deal with it. i wanted to deal with it. but i realized i needed to leave. not because the work itself was bad, but because it reminded me of toxic things. (10/13)

so today i sent that resignation email, and i received nothing but love and support from my cofounders. it hurts to think i left them when they collectively did nothing wrong. sometimes (i mean a lot of times) i feel like it is my fault i can't get over my past. (11/13)

healing from my experiences around last year will take a long time. i've learned that no job is worth prolonging my symptoms of mental illness. it hurts to know i gave up, but i find comfort in the fact that today i chose to make room for new, positive experiences. (12/13)

if you or someone you know is leaving a job for mental health reasons, know that it is not always because of the environment or people. sometimes it is just hard to deal with mental health issues and a job. thank you for listening 💕 (13/13)