MyMentalBreakdown

I took this picture in February 2009 and I want to talk about what was going with my mental state on when I took it.

2009 was the beginning of the end for me in a lot of ways. I had moved back to California from NYC in July of 2008 and taken a job at Yahoo, largely as a last-ditch effort to appease my then wife. After a few months it became clear that things were not getting better. Our first son was two years old at the time, things weren't going great in New York, and I was desperately trying to figure out how to survive an abusive marriage with a mentally unstable woman.

To add to the stress, I had just had my first review at Yahoo and was basically told that I needed to do better. My boss was a kind and understanding person but I could tell that I was not living up to expectations. There had just been a layoff at Yahoo and I was frankly surprised that I wasn't let go. My manager had faith in me and for that I am eternally grateful (thanks Mike!). In time I would go on to be a senior engineer and a very competent manager at Yahoo, ultimately staying there for six years.

The Yahoo campus is on the edge of the San Francisco bay in Sunnyvale. That far south, there's not much of the bay to see - just the remains of salt ponds and the Sunnyvale sewage plant right next door.

One benefit of the campus location was that it was next to a series of trails that ran around the old salt ponds and up and down the bay. You could walk out of the parking garage and in five minutes be out on the water, surrounded by marshland and birds. It was the ideal place to go if you were the sort of person who found solace and escape in walking.

I remember this day very clearly. Every morning, I would take the train from San Francsico to Mountain View and then take a Yahoo shuttle bus to the campus. Sunnyvale is always exactly the same - 72 degrees and sunny.

On this particular day I had spent a few hours in my cube working on some sort of relatively meaningless project. I felt my life was a complete failure. I had failed in my marriage, I had failed at my job, and I had failed in life in general. I was at a very low point. Not suicidal, that's not my thing, but as close to giving up hope as I had ever been. I could think of no way I would ever be able to get away from my abusive wife, and I had nowhere to turn. I loved my son but felt like I had completely failed him. In that mindset there was no way I could do any useful work in the office so I just said fuck it, I'm going for a walk.

I wandered out on the trails behind Yahoo for a good hour or so, barely thinking about anything. I found a radar tower out in the wetlands which presumably was