The fear, said plainly
I have been frightened about all this for a while now. I have got better at saying it without dressing it up, so this is the plain version.
It is not a fear of machines. I like the tools, I spend my days in the middle of the work, and I am still building every week. The fear is smaller and nearer than that. It sits under ordinary things.
It turns up when work goes well. I finish something, it does what I wanted, and I am pleased with it for a moment. Then the second thought arrives on its own: how many more of these. Not dread. Just a question I cannot answer, sitting in a room I have to keep working in.
It turns up when I quote for a job. I write the number down and I notice I am doing sums now that I never used to do, working out what the same thing would look like if a model took the first pass. Nobody asked me to do that. I just do it. That is the part that stays with me, more than any story about what the tools can do next.
Most days it is not there at all, and that is the honest shape of it. I have good weeks. I ship things, I fix somebody's server, I forget the whole question for days together. Then something small puts it back in the room and I sit with it for an evening and get on with the week.
What I will not do is dress it up as courage. It is not. I am not carrying on because I have a plan that beats what is coming. I am carrying on because the work is still here, I am good at it, and stopping now would just make the last of it shorter and poorer while the same thing arrived anyway. That is the whole reason and I will not pretend it is grander.
I will not hand any of this round as a lesson either. It is what it is like from this chair, and nothing more. I am still shipping. I am still learning the tools behind all of it, which brings its own strange feeling that I have not worked out how to write about yet.
So there it is. I am not asking for a fix or a turn of mood. I would rather have it written down here than leave it out, because everything else I write would otherwise read as though I had made my peace with it. I have not, and I do not expect to. I am working, and I am still frightened.