I Am Invincible

For two days now, I am invincible. I have entered a phase that is as encouraging as it is worrying. It’s cyclical for me.

Suddenly, everything becomes possible. I make plans, I project myself into an activity, into its success, and I feel myself growing wings.

The Trigger

For months I have been developing a plugin for automated translation of articles and pages for WordPress. I spend, sporadically, many hours on it, iteration after iteration with various artificial intelligence tools. I had reached a stage where it was working more or less well.

Initially imagining publishing it for free as open source, I questioned this approach. Being currently unemployed and without income, I must seriously start finding how to generate revenue. Given the time and money invested in this project, I began to think that I could, I should, make it a commercial product.

I then started a conversation with my friend Claude (.ai), and I began to think about what I needed to do to make this possible. And step by step, I gained confidence. It became clear, crystal clear, possible.

By the end of the conversation, I was certain, everything was possible!

The Explosion of Productivity

These periods of invincibility are fascinating. I feel strong, creative, and I become very productive. I regain confidence in myself, and my fears diminish, even disappear. I dare much more to exchange, discuss, assert, demand.

I then start working for endless hours. I enter this state that some call « The Zone » and which is more scientifically called hyper-focus, one of the characteristics of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder): periods of several hours during which all notion of time and environment disappears. Perhaps, reader, you will recognize yourself without necessarily having put a word to it, or a colleague, a partner. The famous « I’ll be there in 5 minutes » that has turned into several hours when suddenly we regain contact with the reality that surrounds us.

The Risks

Exhaustion is the first risk. And it’s probably periods like this that caused me undiagnosed burnouts in the past. When I worked at Dell (when I was young, handsome and inexhaustible), it was common for me to spend the night at the office working on parallel projects like the intranet, extranet, and other tools that brought a lot of value to my colleagues without being in my job description and performance reviews.

The second is discouragement. Since the period is temporary, it implies that it will be followed by a period of fatigue and recovery. And it’s logical: without rest, it’s exhaustion, and burnout. If I don’t have a burnout, it’s because the energy and interest in the project went down before exhaustion arrived. I can no longer count the number of projects I launched into, convinced I would easily see them through, and that I ended up abandoning, reinforcing my feeling of illegitimacy.

Finally, in my particular case, with complex post-traumatic stress syndrome, the result of violence and repeated harassment in childhood and throughout my adult life, the fear of failure can also take me into a dizzying fall when faced with a plan that becomes concrete. And there, it’s self-sabotage: « Don’t take the risk of going through with it, because if it doesn’t work, you won’t be able to handle it, and if it works, you won’t be able to deliver. » I’m simplifying. You have to understand that this is not literally thought like that. It’s an unconscious survival strategy.

Why Would This Time Be Different?

To be honest, as I write this article, I have no certainty of going through with it this time. I do however have in my toolkit tools that I didn’t have previously: I now understand how it works. I know it’s cyclical. I am perfectly aware that I will be in euphoria for a more or less long period, and that I will get tired, hesitate, want to give up.

It’s with this knowledge, this understanding that I can « cheat fate. » When these feelings present themselves, I will be able to contemplate them, and decide what I want to do with them. And there are several possible choices: Hold on and continue the project at all costs (risk of exhaustion), wait for it to pass and take advantage of it to rest, or abandon (risk of going backwards with rebuilding my self-esteem).

So?

So we’ll talk about it again in some time. Today I have a clear, very extensive plan. I have redesigned the entire architecture of my product, with scalability and simplicity in mind. I have a very clear plan, and I will post regularly on LinkedIn about my progress to encourage myself, to keep myself under pressure. And the future will tell us which option I chose when my invincibility cracked.