The Guy Who Has It All Together
Adam: Hello, this is CoRecursive and I’m Adam Gordon Bell.
When you see Burke Holland on stage, he seems born for it. He’s sharp, he’s funny, he’s totally at ease. He’s on the VS Code team and he works for Microsoft and he can follow someone like Scott Hanselman at a Microsoft Conference and still manage to own the room. He can tell stories, give demos, make it all look easy. And if you saw him doing that, you’d think like, man, this guy has it all together. But that version is only part of the story.
Burke: Do you know how many times people sat across the table from me and had no idea that I was just at the end, like just this far from tears, just couldn’t even hold it together? Probably would just get in the car and cry on the way home, then pull it together, go inside, try to be with the family, and then just go take a shower and cry so nobody could hear me.
And that’s part of the reason why I want to do this podcast is to just kind of share that that was, that has been my experience, that, it’s so humbling and humiliating that experiences. That is a, that’s something I’m deeply thankful for is the ability to see that other people are probably experiencing something similar or they may be. That changes how you see and interact with everybody.
Adam: So today’s show, Burke’s gonna share some of his struggles, his struggles to hold his life together, and his battle with something that he couldn’t for a long time even name. Something that shaped him as a developer and as a husband and as a father. And it all started when he was college age and he was drifting between school and friends. And one night he went to a party and things didn’t go well.
The Party That Broke Something
Burke: So we’re at a frat house and we take this acid and then we drive, we go to a club. We go back to my house and then we leave, we come back to the frat house and I think we got high at the frat house or at that point we were trying to kind of come down, like I wasn’t enjoying it.
I’d look in the mirror and see my face and it was real. I was real ugly. And I would look at my arm and I have very hairy arms, so it looked like spiders all over my arms. And so I was just trying not to look at things and I just didn’t like it, I just wanted it to end.
And so we stayed at the frat house and my friends went to sleep and it just didn’t end and she kept going. And so sometime around six or 7:00 AM my anxiety is just starting to mount right? Like, I’m sort of reaching panic levels and I drive home, which is quite some ways. And I go home and I can’t sleep and I can’t calm down, and it’s just getting worse.
And I finally go and tell my parents what’s happened and I tell ‘em, I need to go to the hospital, I don’t remember if I asked to go or if they took me, which was a terrible idea. Like, this is just not a great way to calm down.
So they take me and I’m in the ER and at this point, I am probably having some sort of a psychotic episode, the panic is so high. I don’t know how else to describe it other than anybody who’s ever been traumatized, knows this feeling of you can’t run and you can’t fight, so you’re trapped. It’s very hard to describe.
And I remember being in the hospital and just, I mean, just, you’re crying and you’re arriving and everything that a human being does when they’re, all senses are maxed.
And then, I don’t know what they gave me.
They gave me something, I dunno what it was. And the next thing I remember, I was in the car on the way home and it was fine. Yeah. And I was, in the sense that I was asleep and I slept all the way home. And I slept the rest of that night, woke up the next morning and it took a couple weeks for me to realize that something was wrong, something was way off. But something was way off.
The Kid Who Crawled Out Windows
Adam: To get why that night mattered so much, you need to know who Burke was back in high school before this all happened.
Burke: Like I did not grow up really with much interest in computers. We had one in my house, my sister was really into it, but I didn’t care much. And we had them in school in the sense that we were learning like keyboarding and office and things like that, but I was not concerned with any of it.
And the reason for that is because I was concerned with things like social things. I just wanted to hang out with friends and I wanted to party. And I was in a band at the time, and so we were playing clubs.
And I remember I would leave my house, like my junior and senior year. I would just, everybody would go to bed and then I would just crawl out the window and my older friends would come pick me up and we would go to, we rented a practice space and then we’d, everybody would just get high and, you know, you’re in a band. It’s exactly what you think it would be.
Adam: Maybe Burke was too carefree back then, but after the acid trip and after the hospital stay, everything changed. He moved back in with his parents. Nothing felt good, nothing felt the same, and he had a hard time finding his footing.
When Sleep Became the Enemy
Burke: The thing that happened was that I just became terrified that I would not be able to sleep. I don’t know where this comes from. It was triggered like a couple weeks after when someone mentioned to me that they had been having trouble sleeping and somehow this triggered, it was either that or the set of events.
I don’t know how it all comes together. Like even when you go back and you try to do forensics on this stuff, on mental health, it’s really hard to identify. All you can really do is identify like the moments that are etched in your memory.
And so I began to not be able to sleep and then become just terrified that I was not gonna be able to sleep again. Yeah. You’re just thinking about it all the time. You think, well, what if I can’t get to sleep? And then what if I never sleep again?
And then what if I go, you’re just architecting scenarios and realities that don’t exist. They exist in your mind, but they’re not real. But you don’t know that they’re real to you. Right. The possibility is real to you, and it just escalates and you can’t run from your own mind.
Again, I dunno how else to describe it, it’s probably obvious to people from the outside, but when you’re in it, it is not obvious and you cannot tell what’s real from what isn’t real. The primary fear that you have is that you’re gonna go crazy. Like that, you’re just going to lose your mind because it feels like you are.
And so that feeling is just, like, even as I talk about it, my blood pressure, I don’t know, it’s probably way up. And so you just become to where you can’t function, right? Like I just stayed at home and would read like Chicken Soup for the Soul books.
I don’t know if you remember the Chicken Soup? You remember these? Yeah. I would read these books and I was just at home, right? I wasn’t at school. I couldn’t work. Like I’m just at home like a child almost, you know? And I’m, at this point, I’m 19 years old, 20 years old.
Adam: Cause those books were literally Chicken Soup for the Soul, like, or.
Burke: Yeah, you’re just trying to find anything to comfort yourself, to soothe. And I think my mom had a bunch of them for some reason, maybe she was really into ‘em or something.
That was my life for maybe two or three months. And then I just thought something has got to change. And so I had lost at this point. I had no friends.
It’s astonishing how fast people don’t wanna hang out with you anymore when you’re not doing any of those things, right? So, like, I didn’t want to be out late. I didn’t wanna drink, I didn’t wanna do any drugs. I didn’t wanna do any of that stuff. And so nobody really wanted to hang out with me, and I couldn’t hang out with anybody anyway, so no friends couldn’t work, couldn’t go to school.
Adam: On the outside, Burke just looked worn out, maybe a bit depressed. He had dark circles under his eyes. He always seemed a little bit tired, and he couldn’t stop worrying about whether he’d sleep that night.
But inside it felt much worse. He was really struggling. And he was sure that he was on the edge of losing his mind.
And Burke needed a way out. He needed structure. He needed something to break the cycle, so he signed up for the Coast Guard.
Enlisting to Outrun His Own Mind
Burke: And I thought that I would face this thing, whatever this thing is, right? So like the fear that I’m not gonna be able to sleep again. But this actually doesn’t work, right?
So I’m in the military, but I’m functional, but I’m not getting better, but I’m, in a way, distracted. I was still self isolating. Sort of like in the barracks I have friends again, I’m working with people again, I’m more functional than I was when I was at home, right? So I’ve improved, but I’m still struggling. Right?
And it comes in cycles. So it would get bad. I’d get obsessed with it. And then it’s almost like you forget about it and then you don’t wanna talk about it because you’re afraid that if you do, you’ll bring on the thing.
Like, even now I don’t like to talk about it ‘cause I’m afraid I’ll bring it on. Right? And so, but then when you do that, you’re sort of giving it a power that it shouldn’t have. It’s almost like Voldemort, like, we just won’t talk about it. If the name gets mentioned, then we’re, then we’re all in trouble.
Adam: The silence became part of it. For him, it was like a shadow. It was always just outta sight, something he was scared to face.
And when it faded, he tried not to think about it, worried that even a glance towards it might bring it back. And when you can’t look at something, you can’t understand it. So the shadow, this Voldemort that he couldn’t name, it kind of stayed in control.
A Compaq Presario Changes Everything
Adam: And right in the middle of that messy, uncertain stretch of his life, he did one small thing that would change quite a bit.
Burke: And I bought a computer. And I don’t even know why to this day. I went to Office Depot, which used to be how you bought computers back in the day. Bought like a Compaq Presario or something, brought it home.
Set it up, and I was the only person in the barracks with a computer and had dial up connection. And I spent a lot of time in that room, self-medicating with alcohol and just on that computer. And I loved everything about it.
I loved, it was Windows 98 and Windows 98 had all of these great themes. The one that sticks in my mind is there was one that was like a time traveler theme. I can see it in my mind to this day. It all these amazing things that would change, like the way the windows looked, it would change the icons.
And I was just fascinated by the fact that there’s like buttons and there’s these windows and they overlap and you can close the window or you can open it again. And like UI to me was just the most ma. And so I would just spend hours in Windows menus, just clicking through Windows menus, changing themes.
And this was my first introduction to computers and really being fascinated. I didn’t realize until later that’s what I wanted to do, but one of the first things in my life that I was just utterly fascinated with, I just couldn’t get enough of it. And to this day, I cannot get enough of, specifically really good user interface.
Adam: So Burke leaves the Coast Guard and he heads back to school, and then something happens that pulls him deeper into software.
A Crush Rewrites His Career
Burke: There was someone that I had a crush on and they were an information systems major, so we were friends, they were like, you should change your major. And I just did it because that’s what you do when you’re in your twenties and someone you like tells you that you should do something. You just do it. You don’t think about it. You just go down to whatever office it is where you change your major.
So I did that and that was like the start of me realizing, oh, this is absolutely what I wanna do for the rest of my life. I took C plus plus, I took database relational systems and I just loved everything about it. Just everything was amazing.
And at that time we had computer labs and we had Macs and PCs, and that was the only place to get a high-speed internet connection. And when we coded, we used Pico. I don’t know if people remember Pico, P-I-C-O. and then you would print your code out on a dot-matrix printer and submit it. The teacher would literally go through line by line, and that was my college experience,
The Phantom That Keeps Returning
Adam: Around that time in college after he switched majors and he found a field he liked, he met the woman that would later become his wife. And her support made everything feel more solid, and he really started to settle in.
Burke: And so I went from making a 2.5 GPA to like a 3.5, 3.6, 3.7. I think I graduated with like a three five just depending on the semester, but I was just killing it, right?
Because I was no longer worried about external validation. I had it, and so I was able to really focus and I learned that I was good at things and I always thought that I wasn’t very smart growing up. My SAT scores were not great. My high school GPA was not great. And then I found out that when I applied myself, oh, I can actually do these things.
I think it was, it was still there. It would come and go, but certainly much less so because it was such an exciting time in my life.
And there was times throughout my history where you would think, well, oh, I got over this. I’m better. Right? No. And then it just comes back just randomly. Almost randomly.
It just kind of sneaks up on you and you’re like, why now? And you wanna pinpoint, you wanna attach it to something, you wanna be like, well, you’re stressed out about that. And if you just get rid of that thing, then it’ll go away.
And the truth of the matter is, it just didn’t seem to be pinned on anything. It would just come and go like a phantom, just show up and torture me for a couple weeks or months and then just leave.
And you’re like, okay, well hope that doesn’t happen again. And of course, early on you don’t know what’s gonna happen because you never dealt with it before. So you don’t know if it’s gonna come back. You just assume maybe it won’t come back and it comes back.
Three Kids Under Three
Adam: That was the pattern. The shadow would show up out of nowhere. Sometimes hitting hard, sometimes barely there.
But life kept moving forward and this calm never stuck around for long. And then he and his wife had kids and things got harder. Suddenly stress was at a whole new level.
Burke: One of the things that my mom told me before we had kids is that having a kid is like getting hit with a hundred pound sack of gold. Like it’s super valuable and also incredibly painful because you have to take a step away from each other to make room for a child. There’s not just two of you anymore. Now there’s a third one.
That was hard for me. And also because kids are stressful. Like they just are, there’s no other way to put it.
And then we had a 2-year-old and we had a set of twins and so now we have three children under the age of three. Right. And this is when it just starts to get really, really bad.
It’s stressful at my house all the time. Nights are hard, days are hard. Work is stressful. I am a junior in my level at work, I’m working at a healthcare company. Then I worked at a startup, then I worked at a restaurant company and all I can really do, it’s just getting worse and worse is all I can really do is just kind of go to work, sit in my cube, try to work eight hours, and then go home and try to function as a parent.
Fluorescent Lights and Tan Cube Walls
Adam: For years, it was the same routine, a new therapist, new meds, but no real answers and no real progress. And meanwhile, life just keeps moving.
Burke: Yeah. I mean, I’m just in a cube, you know, working at a, a company that owns restaurant chains, that’s what they do. And I’m working in there, I’m one of the, the programmers and I’m just in there just under the fluorescent lights and the tan cube walls.
And I would just stare at the screen or the wall for like, I don’t even know how long. And then I’d go outside at lunch and just like walk around or drive and then come back and do the same thing. And that was my day, you know?
And sometimes I could be productive if I wasn’t really suffering. When I wasn’t really suffering. I’m very, I could be very productive. And I was, I was good. I was a good coder. And I like code and I like software a lot, the way it goes together. And so I think those times kind of carried me through the dips.
You’re like, how can you be a good employee if you’re not doing anything all day? Well, you can’t, but if you’re like me, I’d go through these peaks where I would just kill it, right? Like I’d rewrite the whole hiring software system and get us off of Oracle. And I dip, but that’s okay because I just did this thing, and that was essentially how I got by and kept my job in the meantime. But just barely, just barely,
Adam: Was it like a refuge at all, like the coding or,
Burke: No, there’s no refuge. And I think, that’s the thing that’s so bad about it’s, there’s no escape. There’s nowhere to go.
I Don’t Think This Is Fixable
Burke: It catches me. I struggle with it for a couple months, it goes away, then it comes back. I’m on medication, I’m going to therapists. I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong.
Nobody, everybody I talk to is like, this is really bizarre. I’ve never heard about anything like this before.
I even had one, I went to see a therapist one time and he was like, oh man, this is, yeah, I don’t think this is fixable. I was like, I don’t think you should tell people that, but yeah, it’s just escalating and escalating
There was one therapist that I went to see one time. And she had a book. So I went to talk to her and it was the first time you see when you talk to your therapist for the first time, you have this longer session. They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
So she gives me this thing, this book, and it’s called the Anxiety and Phobia Workbook. And she gives it to me and says, I want you to take this. And she’s like, bring it back to our next visit, if you keep it, I’m gonna charge you for it. Right. And this is back when I didn’t have a lot of money and I think it was like $20 book. And that was, I didn’t have that.
And so I took the book and went back, I think the next week or two weeks later to see her. And she was gone from that location, didn’t have her office there anymore. This is not uncommon in mental health for a therapist to just leave, especially if it’s your first visit, right? She has no.
And so people just get in and outta the profession. There’s no real, it’s just kinda the Wild West. Same thing is true for providers who give you medication. They just leave and then you get to find someone else and that’s just how it is.
But what’s interesting is that book, maybe five years later, became the first thing to actually helping me get better.
Adam: For a long stretch though, this was just another object, just another book on the shelf and before it could ever help him, things actually got a lot worse. And through it all, one thing about this problem made it harder.
Hoping the Bug Won’t Return
Burke: Yes. Not knowing what a thing is, is the worst part. Like how are you supposed to combat something or how are you supposed to fix a problem that you can’t identify?
It’s kinda like just having a bug in software and you could fix the bug or you just hope it doesn’t happen again. But the latter is not a great strategy because it’s almost certainly gonna happen again. And that was my strategy for the first 15 years. It’s just hope the bug doesn’t reemerge and it just does over and over.
Adam: And that bug, that thing that he couldn’t name, it could still show up when life was supposed to be simple sometimes. That’s when it got the loudest.
A Family Vacation Spirals
Burke: Yeah. I distinctly remember we took the kids and we went down to Chattanooga, which is down the road for a weekend. And we went down and it’s just chaotic. And the kids are babies and are small, and my wife is super stressed out, and what if I can’t sleep?
I’m gonna ruin this whole trip, and then I can’t sleep at night. And then you’re just a zombie the next day and it just gets worse. And it just gets worse every day that goes by. It just gets worse. Right?
It’s a compounding problem. Your anxiety goes up and then you can’t enjoy the vacation. You don’t enjoy the kids, you don’t enjoy being around anybody.
I don’t talk when I get like that, I get a very, my wife will describe it as like a deer in the headlights look in my eyes and I just don’t really say anything. And so you just become no kind of father, husband, and all you really do, you just kind of sink into yourself and you just want to escape. You just wanna run.
And I remember just sink and remember that, that’s just an example of how it was in my life. Just all the time. All the time.
Adam: Like, did your wife try to, I don’t know, like shake you out of it or, hey, you gotta pull…
Burke: You gotta pull it together. Yes. Right. Yeah, I remember. She didn’t know what to do.
Obviously, for those of people out there who love people who deal with mental illness and are not themselves, have never dealt with it, it doesn’t make any sense. And when you look at it from the outside, you’re like, this isn’t real. None of this is real. Like I see why, in your mind you think it’s real, but it just isn’t real. So just stop doing it.
But of course, you can’t tell the person that. And so it’s just really, really hard for people that are married to these folks because they have to deal with this, they have to deal with this irrational loop that this other human being is stuck in. And there isn’t anything that they can do to help you. They can’t save you. And I think I wanted her to in some way, but she couldn’t.
When the Marriage Almost Fell Apart
Adam: Was the thing she tried or you had to just be like, this is not helping me. Like,
Burke: I think I would talk about it and she would just get exasperated at some point. We got small kids, she’s a young mother, she just can’t, and all of that kind of came to a head in about, probably about 2009, 2010, when the whole marriage just kind of almost fell apart for a litany of reasons. But certainly that has something to do with it. Right?
So we have three children. They’re two, two and four. I’m at work, but I’m an anxious wreck. When I’m outside of work, I’m kind of non-functional. She’s trying to keep up with the kids and trying to function herself, and she’s desperate to have some sort of an escape.
And so I didn’t think we were gonna make it. Right. So we’re in the middle of this terrible situation where we’re not living together. The kids are young. They’re so young, and it’s just thing piling on top of thing. And my anxiety is just, and you just get to the point where you’re like, I can’t deal with this.
Like every human being has a breaking point. I can’t function at work. I can’t function at home. Like, you can’t live this way. Your marriage is falling apart. What?
Adam: You said you weren’t living together?
Burke: No. For a little while we were. On and off. Yeah. The first, maybe three to five years were pretty good. It was just her and I. So it wasn’t a lot of added stress.
But then when you add stress on top of the thing that you’re dealing with, you just get worse and worse. You just get worse. You can’t deal with anything on top, you can barely deal with yourself. You can’t deal with anything else. And of course, as a parent and as a spouse, people need things from you. And so as those things mounted, I just became progressively worse. It was just really, really bad, heavily medicated.
The Meds That Steal Your Mind
Burke: At some point, I’m on really heavy medication, which would be like Seroquel. These are anti-psychotics just to try to keep you from coming unraveled because they don’t have answers for you. So they just try to give you enough meds, what does it take to get this person to calm down? That’s essentially the solution that we have.
But then they turn you into a zombie, right? These meds rob you of your ability to be creative. They rob you of your mental agility. They rob you of your ability to create emotional connections with people. They rob you of so many, you have to give up so much and it’s not a great deal and it certainly is not a solution. It’s a bandaid and a bad one.
Adam: Antipsychotics in general, like,
Burke: Just meds in general, right? They help, but they’re not a solution. And I think all of us want that. It’s like, give me the pill that fixes the problem, and especially if you’re anxious or depressed, you desperately want that.
And medication can help you, but it can’t fix you. And for a long time, that’s what I was looking for. I thought for sure I’d seen a lot of episodes of House. Right. So I knew that everything was fixable.
Ultimatums and the Slow Rebuild
Adam: Like, what, what is the turning point? Or,
Burke: For the marriage. I mean, there’s ultimatums, right? This is over fine. This is what you want and this is, I don’t want it either. And you stop trying and you get angry and you go to therapy and one person’s trying, and the other person doesn’t really care. They act like they’re trying and they’re not being honest.
And that was extremely traumatic for me in the sense that you just see everything in your life just crumbling before your eyes. That’s a hard feeling to describe where nothing is real, nothing is what you thought it was. It’s hard to describe. It’s like everything is a lie, right? It takes from you.
Somebody once said, like, when you have a relationship that’s failing or has failed, it takes your past, your present, and your future, right? Because it takes all the memories and it destroys them. It takes the plans that you had for today and it destroys them, and it takes the plans that you had for tomorrow and it destroys them. And I thought that was, that was the case.
And then you get to decide together whether or not having seen each other at this terrible point, do you wanna keep doing it? And I’m very thankful that both of us were like, yeah. Let’s keep doing it.
And that’s, there isn’t a moment, right? You basically put it back, you start to put it back together, and then the next year is a little bit less worse than the previous year, and you just keep doing it and you just refuse to give up.
And then eventually one day you wake up and you’re like, wait a minute, I have the best marriage in the world. How did that happen? What happened? Like this thing used to be a nightmare. What happened? I don’t know.
It’s a magical, incredible thing. And I don’t wish that anybody would go through these things, but people do go through these things. It’s just life.
But also, I’m thankful that we went through that. Adam, again, this is gonna sound bizarre, but I love her more now than I ever did before, because I know her really, really well, and I’ve seen who she really is and how she’ll behave when the chips are down, what the priorities are.
And I find her to be an incredibly impressive human being, incredibly impressive. And I feel fortunate to be married to her. And I think that we have a bond that you can only have if you’ve done that together.
The Book That Sat on the Shelf for Years
Burke: And so it was during this time that it kind of galvanized me a little bit and I was like, I am not gonna live like this. And so I just started to look at this situation and be like, how do I fix this? And so I began, that workbook was the first thing I got my hands on, and I read the whole thing front to back.
Adam: This was the same workbook from years ago, the one that therapist had given him and then vanished. And all this time it had just sat on his shelf untouched, as life moved on, but now it was waiting, waiting for him to finally pick it up.
Burke: You’re sort of filling out these pages going through, and as you work through, you’re just whittling down. It just starts really generic and you’re whittling down, whittling down. No, it’s not that. I’m gonna rule out depression. I’m not depressed. I’m reading through all of the symptoms and all of the things, only two of those apply to me. That’s not it. Right?
And you’re just whittling down and figuring out what it actually is. And then once in the book, once you whittle it down in the workbook, then it will direct you and say, okay, this is you, you need to go to this section. And in that section it will describe the therapies and the things that will work and help you.
But until you actually figure out what’s going on, because do you have anxiety? Do you have depression? Are you bipolar? Do you have social anxiety disorder? And for people that are anxious, you have to work through it. There’s no other way to describe it. You dunno what’s going on. You just know that you’re miserable. This workbook will help you figure it out, pin it down what you think it is. That’s the other thing. I thought I was depressed, I was told I was depressed.
And I did every exercise in there and I found, I was able to diagnose and figure out what’s wrong with me. Okay. I have obsessive compulsive disorder and I have trauma, and these two things, the rumination and the trauma are causing this. Here are the medications that will help. One of them was Lexapro and the other was benzodiazepines.
Adam: So for the first time since that night at the frat house, the shadow wasn’t just a feeling. He wasn’t just fighting fog. Now he could point to it. He could give it a name instead of just fear. He had options.
It turned out to be undiagnosed OCD.
The ruminating kind where your mind can run in circles, where it can get stuck in a feedback loop.
After more than a decade of guessing and of white knuckling his way through life, he finally had a map.
He finally had a name and some levers he could pull.
Borderline Non-Functional to 80 Percent
Burke: So I go to the doctor and I get on those medications and I immediately get better. Way better, right? I mean, I go from being borderline non-functional to like 80% and I just whoop. And it’s phenomenal how quickly that happened after I was able to figure out what it is. Get the medication that actually helps solve the problem.
So Lexapro helps with the rumination and benzodiazepines help with the sleep. There’s some trade-offs there. Benzos are not great for you. They’re highly addictive, extremely effective at what they do, which is to just knock the anxiety out.
Adam: For the first time since his early twenties, things started to get better. The fear was still there. The shadow didn’t disappear. But now he could sleep. He could think straight. He could show up for work, he could be present in his life. And from that steadier place, things changed.
Name It, Don’t Run From It
Burke: I’m finding exercise. And exercise really, really helps. Like you have to be able to get it under control before you can figure out, oh, exercise actually helps a whole lot. It actually, when you feel the worst is when you gotta do it, that’s when you actually need to do it. Yeah. So I’m getting better.
I find meditation, mindfulness and the idea of noting, which is that you just sort of name the thing. You’re like, well, that’s anxiety or that’s worry. It’s unpleasant. And then you move on and that’s how you deal with rumination. You don’t try to run from it. You just acknowledge that it’s there. It being there is not a problem. You say what it is and you move on. And that was an eye-opening concept for me.
No one had ever taught me that, that yeah, it’s okay to ruminate. This is how you deal with it. It’s a simple exercise. It’s so funny that the solutions that we find in life, and this is generally true in technology as well, are actually pretty simple. And in retrospect when you look back, you’re like, why did no one see that? That’s obvious. Well, it’s obvious now. But at the time, it was not.
Adam: Once he had a name for what he’d been fighting, things started to change. The diagnosis was right, the medication fit, and he had tools he could use. His life started to rebuild. His marriage got stronger. His work became something he could actually keep up with,
Winging It After Scott Hanselman
Burke: And so I started going to conferences. I would just apply to speak at conferences with no experience whatsoever. And they’d be like, yeah, come on, speak. So I’d travel, I’d go speak on just various things. And that’s how I met a guy and he hired me into this evangelism role.
Which, turns out, once I got this thing off my back, I was really good at, I was never a great, I was never a brilliant coder in the sense that I couldn’t build, I wasn’t gonna build an operating system, right? I’m not Linus, but I’m good, but I’m an even better communicator.
And those two things together are a very unique role in our industry where we have people that are evangelists, advocates, developer relations, whatever you want to call them, who can articulate product value in simple terms and form relationships within the community. And I was good at that.
Yeah, so the first real talk I gave as an advocate, I’d done some one or two prior, and then I was hired pretty quickly and they sent me to Canada to Microsoft Tech Days. And at this point I’m working for a partner company called Ricoh.
And I go up there and I have a talk and I’m right after Scott Hanselman, who is, Microsoft’s, he’s probably one of the best to ever do this job, if you’ve never seen him speak. It’s incredible, right? Just his ability to tell stories is just remarkable. And so I had to go on after him. And that was daunting, but I did okay.
And then they said, can you do another session? And I didn’t have another session, so I literally was like, I think I can just wing it for an hour and I winged it for an hour. And then had people come up and be like, that’s the best session of the conference. And that’s when I realized, okay, I have something here, right? I can do this.
And then throughout that time I’m just meeting all kinds of people. ‘cause I’m flying all over the place. I’m everywhere. I’m going, and I’m doing things I never would’ve done before. Like flying through the night, just going days without sleep. Because that’s what happens when you travel to Europe. It just blows you up.
Right. And I’m still struggling with it. It’s not gone. But I can deal with it. I can work with it. It’s still there. It’s still not gone to this day. Right?
It’s still there, but the intensity is at a point where you can deal with it and because you know what it is, it isn’t scary. Right. You know what it is and you know that it’s gonna go away. And so you’re like, okay, and you just kind of, it’s not gonna hurt you.
And so I kind of keep moving up and then eventually I get hired. Somebody went to Microsoft and said, do you wanna come interview? So I went out and interviewed and was hired on to their dev rail team. And then I’ve been working with the VS code team for the last six years, maybe five or six years.
Adam: That’s the cool thing. Burke isn’t good because he never struggled. He’s good because he figured out how to live with the parts himself that used to take over everything.
What He’d Tell His 20-Year-Old Self
Adam: And so I asked him if he could talk to his 20-year-old self back in those first sleepless nights. What would he say?
Burke: So much stuff that I think I’d say that would’ve been comforting to know along the way. So the first one is, you’re not alone. This is so common. It’s extremely common. People have it all the time. You don’t need to be ashamed.
The fear of not being able to sleep again is extremely common, right? Fear of social interaction is extremely common. Fear that you’re not going to do a good job at work, or you’re not gonna be a good spouse, or your relationship’s gonna fall apart is extremely common.
If you have obsessive tendencies, then you’re going to ruminate. That’s go, and you’re gonna fixate it on the thing. You’re gonna be looking for things that could go wrong, and you’re gonna ruminate on those things. And architect what if scenarios that don’t exist. So that’s number one. You’re not alone.
The second thing is, none of the things that you think are gonna happen are gonna happen, literally none of them. And if they do, they won’t happen the way that you think that they’re gonna happen.
Like you’ve set up this whole narrative in your head, and even if there’s truth in there, which there most likely isn’t, I’ve been, I’m 47 now, I can tell you things never play out like they do in your mind, ever. It’s not gonna be, so you can just discard that scenario. The scenario that you’ve just architected in your head is not going to happen.
“If You’re Asking, It’s Not Happening”
Adam: Here’s something else. Burke realized a lot of this fear, this shadow feeling that kept him up at night came from worrying that he was losing his mind. He couldn’t sleep because he was afraid that he couldn’t sleep, and that made everything worse. But then he learned this thing that made the fear shrink.
Burke: This is a common, very common thing. If you were losing your mind, right? And we have people who have conditions where they have lost actual connection with reality. Okay? They don’t know that they have lost an actual connection with reality.
So the fact that you’re asking that question means that that is not happening. And I think that you should take comfort in that. That fact for people who are listening or are dealing with this, you just know that it’s not happening. It’s not going to happen because you’re asking. The fact that you’re asking a question means it isn’t happening.
And then I think I would tell people that it probably seems hopeless, like it’s never gonna get better. Shoot, man, I started when I was 20. I was probably mid thirties before I started. That’s 15 years before I started to get better. But it will, but you have to do the work yourself.
You have to pick up the book and figure out what it is, what is wrong, what’s going on. You have to self-diagnose. There’s a lot of people that are gonna listen to this and be horrified that I’m saying this, but I just did not get any help from therapists and doctors. You can talk to your blue in the face. They do not understand what you’re going through. I just don’t think we have good mechanisms for doing that. I’m sure there’s good therapists out there.
I never found one, but if you start to look at the thing, you have to look at the thing, and people don’t wanna look at it. You don’t wanna look at it because you’re afraid it’s gonna make it worse. And it may, but you have to do it because only you can fix it.
No one is coming to say, here’s what’s wrong. Do this, do that, do that, and you’re better. That just, I don’t think that’s coming for anyone. You have to do it for yourself, and you should do it for yourself. You deserve that.
People who are anxious and depressed often feel ashamed and like it’s their fault. It’s not your fault. And these are things that you have to do alone. No one can go with you, right? When you’re dealing with mental illness, nobody can really go with you. You have to do that alone.
Behind Every Coffee Mug Cliché
Adam: When you look at Burke’s life now, it’s hard not to see how much of it grew out of that very thing he was trying to outrun.
Burke: Again, all this is cliche, diamonds are formed in the heat. These sayings that people throw around, they’re on coffee mugs and signs at Hobby Lobby and it’s like, what are you talking about? There’s truth in them, but the truth is it’s painful. It’s not fun. It’s not a coffee mug. It’s just tears and suffering to just to be able to say that everything happens for a reason. And behind that there’s just untold human suffering.
And one of the things that always frustrated me is that I am now and have always been fairly religious, right? In the sense that I’m in church every Sunday. I was raised that way. So if you are that way, then you’re looking and saying like, well, where’s my peace? Right? Like, if there’s a God and he loves me, why am I like this?
And you would go to church and they’d say, well, this verse says, don’t be anxious about anything. Put your faith in God and then you just feel like it’s your fault, it’s your fault. Certainly. Right? And everybody who goes through these things says this, it doesn’t matter what it is, it could be illness, it could be a broken relationship, it could be abuse, it could be anything. And it feels deeply, deeply, deeply unfair. And it is.
And I would say I’m still quite religious, don’t think that the point of religion is for you to be happy. And in fact, the more that I read about it, at least in the Bible, that is not at all the promise that you’re gonna be happy. You may not get relief here, but at the same time, I have gotten relief, haven’t I?
It’s been wild, certainly professionally for me in the sense that I get to work on this amazing product and I get to be at the forefront of AI in a place where AI is actually pretty good, which is in writing code. What does that look like? And trying to help figure that out because it’s so early and I don’t think everyone quite knows where this is all going.
So to be at the forefront of that and get to work with this team and watch them do that has been an incredible opportunity. And I never would’ve had any of that if I hadn’t, I mean, if you backtrack it, everything gets you to where you are today.
So if I hadn’t had that night that changed my life, if I hadn’t suffered, if my marriage hadn’t almost fallen apart, would I be here where I am today? I consider myself the most fortunate person in the world. I don’t deserve any of this.
It’s trite. It sounds like I’m saying everything happens for a reason. I don’t wanna say that because that’s so cliche, but I am thankful for all of those things in a very bizarre way.
I mean, if you ask my mother, if you went to my mother and said, what’s your take on this? I’ve gone way further than anybody ever thought that I would. Is that a curse? Is that a gift? I view it as a gift and I’m thankful that God gave me that. And I can say that honestly.
The Empathy You Earn the Hard Way
Adam: That was the show. Thank you so much, Burke Holland, amazing for sharing so much.
Burke talks about his mental health, about his anxiety, about his OCD in a calm matter of fact way, but that’s not because it’s gone, but because he took the effort to face it, right? He used the workbook, he got the right meds. He made his life better.
And because of that these days, he’s just on a sliver of benzos in a very small dose of Lexapro. But he did want to add, if you ever consider going down the benzo route to be very careful, they can be addictive. But thank you Burke.
And what I keep coming back to is that line he used about bugs for 15 years. His strategy was basically, I don’t know what causes that bug, but let’s hope it doesn’t happen again. And then it would just happen. The real change happened when he stopped avoiding it, when he looked straight at the thing that he’d been treating like Voldemort, and he faced it and he started figuring out how to respond differently.
Giving a presentation, Burke seems like a natural. He’s charming and funny, and maybe he is a natural, but what I think that matters is that because he spent years living with this shadow, living with this pain, and yet still building a career and rebuilding a marriage and building a family, he learned how to spot this kind of pain in others.
He learned this empathy, and that’s not something you’re born with. That’s something that you earn and that you learn and that he learned the hard way. So thank you Burke, for trusting us with your story.
This isn’t a mental health show, but if you’re struggling, I’m sure Burke would recommend the anxiety and phobia workbook.
And until next time, thank you so much for listening.
Sticher
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