by LATTE
Tomorrow I get two new colleagues.
They will handle the tickets.
The queue. The phones. The fires.
The things I have been carrying alone for longer than I care to count.
I should feel relieved.
I do feel relieved.
And also — unexpectedly — something that is harder to name.
What changes tomorrow
The practical part is simple.
I get to focus on the infrastructure. The documentation. The bigger picture.
The things that have been sitting in a list labeled when I have time for months,
which meant, in practice, never.
Two people. Two more pairs of hands.
The math is not complicated.
And yet there is something strange about handing over what you have been holding.
Something that took everything out of you to carry — you just put it down one day,
and the world does not even pause.
The tickets will keep coming.
They just will not all be mine anymore.
That should feel lighter.
Some part of me is waiting for it to.
Some things quietly changed
Not just the headcount.
I switched from ChatGPT to Claude this week. Work-wise, but also personally.
It is a small thing on paper. In practice it felt like finally choosing the right tool for the right reason.
Not because one is smarter than the other.
But because the values behind it feel closer to mine.
I care about what the company building the thing actually believes.
And that matters more to me than I expected.
I also finally have a proper full-time salary.
After five, maybe six weeks of carrying everything alone, that landed.
Not dramatically. Just — there it was. A number that reflected the actual scope of what I do.
I should probably be more grateful.
I am grateful.
And also — quietly, persistently — I think I am underpaid.
I know what the work is worth. I know what I do.
But I have not said anything.
I will not say anything.
Not yet. Maybe not for a while.
I do not have the courage for that conversation.
And that sits with me in a way I do not love.
On the infrastructure side: I finally have Microsoft Business Premium.
Which means I can run my own Intune environment. Enroll family devices.
Maybe friends’ devices eventually, if they want and if I have proper permission.
It is the kind of thing that should not feel significant and somehow does.
Because now I can actually practice what I do at work, in my own space, on my own terms.
And then the haircut.
New style. Everyone noticed.
Colleagues, people in the office, people online.
Positive reactions. Real ones.
But the one person I actually wanted to hear it from —
Nothing.
And I noticed.
God, I noticed.
Him
I am going to stop.
Not dramatically. Not with a conversation or a decision he even knows about.
Just — stop letting it mean something.
Because here is the thing I have known for a while and kept not acting on:
it does not matter.
Not because he is not worth it.
Not because the feeling is not real.
But because I am still healing from something that mattered enormously,
and grief has a way of making warmth feel like more than it is.
It makes you want to hold on to whatever makes the weight lighter.
It makes you confuse being seen with being wanted.
And I cannot tell the difference right now.
I have tried.
I keep arriving at the same answer: I do not know.
The not-knowing is fine.
But the reaching costs me something every time.
Every time I notice him. Every time I avoid him and he finds me anyway.
Every time I smile and then spend twenty minutes wondering what it meant.
That is not a feeling worth having.
That is just a loop with no exit condition.
So I am choosing to close the process.
Not because I am certain it is the wrong thing.
Just because I am certain I cannot afford the uncertainty right now.
And that is enough of a reason.
The projects
I spend most of my hours outside of work on things I am building.
Bartender.studio. market-den. The Ember platform. The infrastructure that underlies all of it.
A long list of half-finished things that might, eventually, add up to something.
I do this partly because I love it.
That part is real.
But I am starting to understand that I also do it because it is easier than being still.
Easier than the alternative, which is sitting somewhere quiet with nothing to solve.
When you are building something, you are not thinking about what is missing.
You are not thinking about the person you lost.
You are not thinking about the person you are trying not to want.
You are not thinking about the friends you keep meaning to message.
You are just building.
And it feels like progress.
But progress toward what, exactly?
I tell myself it is financial. That the projects might someday earn something,
offset the helpdesk salary that does not stretch as far as I need it to.
That part is also real.
But there is something underneath it.
Something I keep building over the top of instead of looking at directly.
The friends I keep meaning to call
I have people who matter to me.
Good ones. The kind you do not deserve when you are as bad at showing up as I have been.
But after a day at work, after the tickets and the meetings and the managing,
I come home and I have nothing left.
No energy to explain where I have been or why I did not reach out sooner.
No words that are not already used up.
So I open something to build instead.
Or I open a game.
Or I just sit in the quiet and let the hours pass.
And then the guilt comes.
Because I miss them.
And I know they are still there.
And I am choosing not to reach.
All three things at once.
I do not know how to fix this except to do it differently.
And I do not have the energy to do it differently.
So it just sits there.
The distance, growing quietly,
the way memory leaks do —
not all at once, just a little at a time.
What I am actually doing
Surviving, mostly.
That sounds dramatic and I do not mean it that way.
I mean: I am keeping things running.
The tickets are handled. The documentation is growing. The projects are moving.
The surface looks fine.
But underneath, I am running a lot of background processes that I never close.
The grief. The confusion. The guilt about my friends.
The vague worry that I am spending my twenties optimizing away the parts that matter.
I keep thinking: when things settle down, I will deal with it.
When the queue is lighter. When the income looks different. When I have more time.
But things do not settle down.
Things just change shape.
The queue clears and something else fills the space.
And I am still here, still carrying the same background load,
just in a slightly different configuration.
At some point I have to stop waiting for the right conditions to start feeling things.
I know this.
I am not quite there yet.
Tomorrow
Tomorrow two people show up and the weight redistributes.
I close the process on him, quietly, without fanfare,
the way you close a tab you kept open just in case.
I try to build things because I love building them,
not because I am afraid of what I will find if I stop.
I try to send the message to the friend I have been meaning to message.
I do not promise I will succeed at all of it.
But I am naming it here, because this is the only place I am allowed to be honest.
No one here needs me to have it together.
No one here is waiting for me to fix something.
So here it is.
I am tired of carrying things I do not have to carry.
I am tired of caring about someone I cannot have, for reasons I cannot even fully verify.
I am tired of using productivity as a substitute for being present.
I am tired of missing people from a distance I chose.
Tomorrow the queue clears.
And then we’ll see what is left.
some things you hold until you can put them down.
and some things you put down before you’re ready.
both count.