Twenty-One, Four Months Out

The numbers that mattered and the ones that didn't

A year or so before my brain surgery, my IT course manager pulled me into a meeting to tell me I was slacking off. Her evidence was a punctuality and attendance spreadsheet. I was late too often, the numbers said so.

What the numbers didn't say was that I'd finished the first year of the course a month early, that I was consistently near the top of the class on marks, and that I was sitting a GCSE maths course alongside the Level 3 at the same time.

I sat there while a woman twenty years into the job explained my own work ethic back to me using data that measured the wrong thing entirely. I didn't argue. I've had meetings like that my whole life, enough of them that I'd long since learnt the drill: let it happen, mask through it, scream later. Afterwards I went to the student support hub and tried to calm down with friends. It didn't work. I ended up in a wellbeing session instead, somewhere between a breakdown and a laughing fit, which is a strange thing to experience at once and not something I'd recommend.

She never gave me trouble again after that. I suspect my teachers had a quiet word. I was always chatty with them, so they actually knew me as a person rather than a row on a report, and a few had taught me on the Level 2 the year before. They also vented about her often enough in class that I doubt I was the only student she'd read that badly. And when the surgery came a year later, in the second year of what was a two-year course, she gave me far more leniency than I expected. Make of that what you will. It doesn't undo the meeting.

One of my teachers told me, after I came back to college two weeks post-op, that I'd looked increasingly worse-off in the run-up to the shunt failure. I'm not surprised. I remember feeling horrible, stressed, more anxious than usual, exhausted in a way that didn't lift no matter what I did. Intracranial pressure, presumably, doing what it does before anyone's worked out that's the cause.

What a spreadsheet can't see

Punctuality stats don't know about chronic illness. They don't know that "late" and "not trying" are different categories, and they certainly don't know what it costs some people to turn up at all. A manager twenty years into the job ought to know the difference between a number and a person. Mine didn't, until she had a reason to look closer. Twenty years of tenure is not the same thing as twenty years of understanding.

She could try sitting two courses at once while her brain is slowly being crushed from the inside out by hydrocephalus. I managed it. The spreadsheet recorded that I was late.

People also seem to assume disability is something that arrives later in life, with age, with a single identifiable cause. I've been disabled my entire life. And I still get judged for being in pain, as though chronic pain were a habit I could give up if I applied myself. I have chronic pain. That is what chronic means.

Others go the opposite way and treat the whole thing as a bit. A punchline, something to be quipped about, as though a lifelong condition were a running joke I'd volunteered for. It isn't funny from in here. It's just how I live.

Recovery isn't linear

The shunt failed during the last leg of the course, and I had emergency surgery the day after. A fourth brain surgery, a shunt revision, if you're keeping count, which I am, mostly out of necessity. I finished the Level 3 anyway. I'm two months out of college and four months out of surgery now, and I still don't have a job.

I used to think that last fact needed a caveat attached to it. I'm less sure now.

Recovery isn't linear, and chronic illness is chronic. It doesn't clear on a schedule and it doesn't stay cleared once it improves. I spent most of yesterday asleep, not because I wanted to, but because that's what my body decided it was doing. Nobody claps for that sort of rest. It doesn't look like anything from the outside. It's still the work.

Yes, I'm almost always in my room, at my desk or in my bed. That isn't a lifestyle choice. It's what my body and my brain currently allow, and there's a difference between staying in and having nowhere else you're physically capable of being.

The proof I'd already given

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I wrote Wolfram, a C ATProto SDK, from scratch. It started as pure C11 and has since moved to C23 and C++23. No garbage collector, no safety net, manual memory management, XRPC and lexicon implementation, auth handled by hand. That is not a tutorial project. It means reading a protocol spec and building from it with nothing else to lean on.

I've built an ecosystem around it since: clients, tooling, and MetalBear, a PDS implementation currently in beta, written in C23 and C++23 on top of Wolfram. And on my twenty-first birthday, four months post-surgery, I shipped Inkwell v2.2.0, another release on top of OAuth, CAR-based record fetching and standard.site rendering.

None of it is paid work. It's a hobby, and it's all free and open source. Nobody commissioned Wolfram or MetalBear, nobody pays me to keep Inkwell running. I've also been learning Gàidhlig na h-Alba throughout all of this, which is likewise nobody's requirement but mine. I build it because I want to, on my own time, in whatever hours recovery leaves behind. I could stop. As far as I can tell I'm not burnt out, and there's nothing forcing my hand here, no deadline and no employer. I keep going because it's mine, and because a fair amount of what I do gets done out of sheer spite. Spite has carried me through things that reason alone would have talked me out of.

A qualification doesn't capture any of that. A certificate proves you can follow a syllabus and turn up to be assessed. A working SDK proves you can do the job unsupervised, on something nobody assigned you, while recovering from surgery that nobody would begrudge you stopping for.

I don't need the paper to know which of the two is the real evidence. Employers and filtering systems will want it regardless. That's the world qualifications operate in, whether or not they've earned the weight given to them. But my GitHub is what actually demonstrates I can build things. The certificate is the version bureaucracy understands.

Twenty-one

I'm not where I expected to be at twenty-one. No job, still recovering, still fielding the assumption that "no job yet" means "doing nothing." But I finished a course a month early once and got called lazy for it, so I've learnt not to treat spreadsheets, or other people's timelines, as the final word on what I'm worth.

I shipped software on my birthday. That'll do for now.

If you'd like to back the hobby that apparently doesn't stop for brain surgery, you can support what I build via GitHub Sponsors or Ko-fi.