Singing the self-loathing blues
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I've been having a weird shift in self lately. I think I'm starting to 
exit the stressed-half-to-death-hustling-three-jobs-panic I've been in 
for like, I don't know, seven years? I'm starting to have more brain 
space to think creatively again, have real plans. I'm picking back up 
old ideas in type theory and it feels easier than it ever was before and

I don't know

it feels weird being like "could things have been this easy all along?"

should I have found a way to make academia work the first time around 
all those years ago or taken a job as a programmer where I wouldn't have 
been poor and scrambling for so long?

I was trying to do the right thing. I was trying to be a good person. If 
I hadn't, though, we'd probably have been able to buy a house years ago. 
I could have had hobbies and space to think.

I mean reasoning about counterfactuals is pointless, I know that. I am 
the person I am now from the sum of all my past experiences. A 
hypothetical me who did not spend nearly a decade teaching kids art and 
code has very little in common with the me that exists. Would they have 
been happier? Would that have been a better person? A *worse* person? 
Would they have been more creative and inspired or crushed down into 
conformity?

These are unanswerable questions.

But that doesn't mean you can easily shake the sense that all your 
decisions were bad ones.