I wish I was built for this

There’s a version of me that only exists for the first eight months of a new job. She is excellent. Enthusiastic, thorough, stays late because she wants to. Her manager says she’s a natural. People ask if she used to work in this field before.

She does not last.

Eight months in, sometimes twelve, the novelty wears off. The dopamine that was powering the whole operation quietly exits. What’s left is the masking cost, which doesn’t go anywhere, without the thing that was covering it up.

I have had a lot of jobs. At some point I stopped counting. I even tried different industries, different titles, different offices with different ceiling tiles I stared at during very long meetings. What I understand now, having finally put a name to the thing running my nervous system, is that I was cycling through workplaces the way some people cycle through gym memberships. My brain runs on novelty and shuts down without it. That’s the whole thing.

The part I have not been able to sit with properly is watching other people who don’t. Who have been in the same chair for nine years and seem fine. Who don’t require constant newness to function. I watch them in meetings and I genuinely don’t understand the mechanism.

It’s not that they feel nothing. But somewhere between joining a company and being there a decade, there is a thing they can do that I cannot. And it is not effort. I have tried effort. I have gritted through the loss of interest longer than I should and it ends the same way every time.

What you feel, when the novelty is gone, is that the masking has become the entire job. You’re still doing the work. But you’re now doing it while also managing every conversation, monitoring your face, suppressing the part of your brain that wants to say the actual thing instead of the diplomatic version. And that is a full second job nobody is paying you for.

I feel guilty about this. Nice company. Nice enough colleagues. Meaningful work, even. The kind of job I was supposed to want. And I’m sitting there on a Tuesday afternoon genuinely unable to explain to myself why I want to disappear.

That is not hyperbole. That is the specific dissociation of being in the wrong format for your brain, sustained too long.

Self-employment comes up every time I crash. I dream about it with the same dopamine hit I get from starting new jobs. I know enough now to be suspicious of that feeling. The fantasy version is vivid and compelling. The real version would require doing the same thing every day until I built something. Which is exactly what I can’t do.

I always go back to developemt. the good old IT that has a lot of dopamin built it. Novelty every day. I could learn new ways, new tools for hours. With AI I can do a lot more a lot faster. But I still have to do the things thay pay me for, some of these things are fun, but I have to make it trought the borring part. I’ve now been at the same employer for alwost three years. A reccord. Wanted to quit, but I knew from the past that what I have currently is quite good. That does not mean I won’t quit tomorrow.

I don’t have a solution for any of this. I have a better understanding of why the cycle keeps happening. That’s not the same thing. But it’s more than I had before, which was just the quiet conviction that I was the problem. I’m not the problem. I’m juggling a brain who wants to always do new things, that wants to be independant, do it’s own next shiny stuff, always the new shiny stuff. And the sensory overload, and the not being able to stop when tired, and wanting routines part, and insomnia part. I’s not easy. I think if NT got to live in my shoes for a week, they would break down. So I guess I should get a medal, but nobody sees the stuggle behind the mask.