I've come to a near complete shut down of my ability to do the one thing that brings in an income. The work is highly stressful, and I'm doing something like 5 jobs for the salary of less than one and no health benefits. (Upsides are a 1/3 share of all profit and I can't get fired for being trans).

It's terrifying. Contributing stresses are approaching homelessness and lack of access to HRT. I feel like if those weren't an issue, I'd be able to do my work again.

If I can't solve those, my alternative seems to be to walk away from the company I've been trying to build for the last decade, and somehow re-enter the corporate job market as a trans person interviewing for a whole host of jobs that I only want for survival purposes.

How do you even land a job when "excited about their work" is a requirement in tech and you're absolutely not excited about your work? Oh, and you're trans.

@Ratttz Haha. Yeah. Two decades of faking it. Pretty sure I'm never "making it".

My only hope has been to almost make it enough that I could launch into art, music, and writing. Those goals only ever get further away, and it's primarily rent and health care costs that push those goals out further out of reach.

@Ratttz If I sound modest when talking software dev, that's accidental. I'm really good at what I do... when I have enough focus to force myself through the work.

I just also REALLY HATE what I do. The only aspect of software dev I enjoy is the aspect that directly engages people, and that's the part I get to do the least of. It's why I love game dev, and why I hate the rest of "tech".

@Ratttz I miss getting to work on stuff I enjoy. It's weird struggling to focus when I've experienced the opposite, hyper-focus/forgetting-to-eat-focus.

I need to switch that mode of my brain on for the work I have in front of me, but the switch won't move.