I’m almost a decade into my professional career now, and I’m starting to feel like I broadly know what I’m doing. I know this is a trap, but it’s very tempting. I had a couple of meetings this week where I felt like I was doing really well. I challenged some people in productive ways, and I used my experience from a decade of public service to have valuable conversations. I used my experience of twenty years of relationships and navigating the world as an autistic man to have sensitive conversations.

I am starting to feel like I know who I am.

This week I’ve been doing well. I’ve learned a huge amount, though mostly about myself. I’m realising that I’m a very good writer, and that I can challenge effectively, and that I make people feel safe.

In work, I’ve found more incorrect solutions to an intractable problem. Each one reveals a little more of the solution, and so by trial and error I iterate towards an answer. That’s been most of my focus this week. It’s not a particularly interesting update, I’m afraid. I’m just grinding away until I get an answer.

Hey, speaking of grinding! My eyesight is finally imperfect. It’s been a source of great embarassment to me that I’ve had perfect eyesight and yet never become a pilot, so thank goodness I now have a reasonable excuse as to why I’m not doing barrel rolls in a Typhoon. It’s perfectly imperfect, of course, but it now means I can get the most fashionable disability aid out there: spectacles!

(There’s a scene in a show called One Day At A Time, where the protagonist expresses frustration that she has to take medication for the rest of her life for a mental condition. Her friend agrees that it sucks, and compares her plight to his own disability: needing glasses. She’s upset, and says it isn’t the same, that she could die if she doesn’t take her meds. ‘Oh!’ he says, and whips off his glasses. ‘Want to come for a drive?’. It’s a scene that really hammered home to me that in a world in which glasses were never invented, a whole lot of people would be far more disabled than they are.)

In my voluntary work, I’ve been challenging people and writing a lot. Because I do my work on this stuff in the evening or over lunch, outside of other people’s working hours, I’ve really started to focus on how good my asynchronous communication is. I’m trying to make everything clear, and lay out emails in ways that make sense. I’m pretty good at it. I’m enjoying the slightly slower pace, and the freedom to think through what I’m trying to say, and whom I’m speaking to.

At the same time, I’ve had to make some really unpleasant decisions this week. I think I made the right ones, and I’ve documented my reasoning for the decisions. That’s a lesson from returning to software projects and having no idea why a decision was made. It was probably obvious when I made it but now, today: seems like it was a decision made purely to piss me off.

So now I document things.

These were a little harder to write than they have been previously, but I think I’m still trying to figure out the shape. I’ve also got a couple of things going on that I can’t talk about yet, and I can feel those shapes getting in the way of what I’m trying to say.

We’ll get there. But not tonight.