I wonder if finding meaning is like finding your keys: it’s not going to come to you when you’re looking for it, but maybe it’ll sneak up on you.

I’m a little envious of people who have made religion a part of their lives: the cultural structures of organized belief seem to be aligned to help you create and find meaning. There’s a sense of spiritual laws of the universe that you can follow to understand what you’re meant to do while you’re here, and (depending on the religion) there’s a sense that there’s a whole other world when you leave this one, that potentially goes on forever. Earth is just a testing ground before your real life begins.

I don’t have religion, and I’ve struggled to find real meaning. The best I’ve arrived at is that I want to feel like I’m useful. I care a lot about equality and fairness, so I want to work on projects that make the world more equal and fair. I feel like centralized wealth is antithetical to those ideals, so I want to work in ways that share equity rather than allow people to hoard it. I believe that collectives and communities and more than the sum of their individual parts. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

A chronic self-questioner, I’ve re-examined this ethical philosophy over and over again, and found that it’s right for me. I do think it’s morally correct. But I also think there’s a certain amount of self-justification involved, too: as in, my feeling the need to justify my presence in the world. Why do I deserve to be here? Why should I exist? This ethical structure is one way I can answer that question and sleep at night.

But why should we need meaning at all?

Lately I’ve come to realize that I display classic signs of co-dependency. Most people don’t feel guilty for putting value on their own needs or asserting themselves; I do, and so do people who have been diagnosed as being co-dependent. Although the idea of co-dependency was originally developed through the study of alcoholism and substance abuse, I don’t have a history of those things in my family; instead, I think I came by it through over a decade of caring for my terminally ill mother, and from the intergenerational effects of the concentration camp.

My whole life, people have told me I was “nice”. It feels good. But it’s also the direct effect of not putting enough value on my own needs; of not being assertive enough. The feedback loop of being rewarded for being nice compounds the problem over time: although everybody who has ever told me this has done it with love and good intentions, it’s ultimately a reward for not being assertive.

I read Codependent No More, one of the classic texts on the subject, and although it’s frequently uncomfortably close to the bone, I also found it a bit wanting for my needs. It’s overtly about alcoholism, and is also far more religious than I am. It talks about getting to a healthier place through dependence on a higher power, and I simply can’t bring myself to believe in one. I wish there was something like a recovery program designed for people who don’t have that framework for meaning or belief in something beyond the physical universe.

Nonetheless, it was helpful. There was a passage that hit unexpectedly close to home, which talked about not wanting to end your life not because you enjoyed life and saw potential in the future, but solely out of guilt for its effect on other people. That is how I feel. It is not how I want to feel. I want to feel like life in itself is joyful and meaningful and worth continuing, and I just don’t. I want to run away from it, and find myself in some alternative mirror universe where there aren’t the same pressures and guilts and currents. I don’t want things to stay the same, and I feel guilty about change. I’m set in sadness like aspic.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m in no danger of hurting myself. I’ve had friends die by suicide, and I’m not interested in inflicting that pain on others. There is definitely an allure to ctrl-alt-deleting myself, but only in a vacuum, as a thought experiment. We’ve just got to keep swimming: there’s no alternative.

If we’ve got to keep swimming, and if the status is not quo, and there’s a dynamic I’ve identified that is inhibiting real change, then changing that dynamic becomes the paramount thing to do.

I need to work on myself, in order to undo my codependent traits and build a new bedrock of self-worth. (A major blocker: I find it hard to believe that you can both be a good person and put yourself first. I know, I know.) In parallel, I need to make sure I’m in a situation where I feel like the people in my life - all of them, in every facet - are looking out for my interests and well-being as much as I’m looking out for theirs. Transactional relationships, which are about what one party can provide to the other, are the enemy of healthy self-worth and well-being. They’ve got to go.

Then there’s this other question: who actually am I? If codependence has become a deeply ingrained part of my personality, which it seems like it has, what does my personality look like when I strip it away? That’s terrifying to me. What if it’s bad?

But what if it’s not? The single biggest piece of feedback I get at work is that I need to be more assertive and do better at holding people to account. There are real-world effects to holding back that go far beyond my own boundaries. Being an effective leader, or an effective anything at work, means setting boundaries based on your expertise and being clear about what’s needed. Being an effective and happy human being means setting boundaries based on your emotional and practical needs. Being more assertive - not being an asshole, but just having those boundaries and standing by them - doesn’t make you a worse person, it makes you more effective. In the right people, with the right relationships, those qualities build respect, not animosity. And the wrong people, the wrong relationships are just that: wrong.

Intellectually, I know this. The thing I need to work on is helping my heart, my nervous system, my cowardly lizard brain, to follow through. I know in my head that my needs are important; I also feel the adrenaline, the cortisol, the feeling in my stomach that tells me something bad is going to happen when I do.

It’s pathetic. I feel pathetic. Other people find this so easy. But that feeling too, the self-flagellation, has go to go. There’s a reason there’s a name for this; it’s a thing, a mental condition, a way of thinking, that people actively suffer from and have to work to get better from.

I’m trying.

I want to build things, and write things, and create and love and find joy in the small beauties of everyday life. I don’t want to feel like my life is sort of built like a trap and that I’m a bad person for wanting to escape it.

I know there’s meaning to be found; more than meaning, I’m looking for satisfaction and belonging. I want to know that it’s right that I’m here, that it’s okay for me to take up space, that I have value in myself.

I’m trying.

This is one of those pieces that probably very few people want to read: you’re here for open source and tech utopianism and how we can all do better on the internet. But this is how I figure out what to do, where I am, how to be; it helps me to put it down in writing. And if this resonates for someone, somewhere, and encourages them to look up the symptoms for codependence and find a way to health, or even just helps them feel a little less alone, then it’ll have been a good thing.

People in tech, in the workforce, in the professional world are still people. We’re all human. I don’t think it does any of us anything but a disservice to try and paper that over. If we put ourselves out there, we can build community, find help, share ideas, and do better together.

Not that I need to justify this piece or anything. Just so you know.