My #2018Liberation List

Cate Huston came up with the awesome idea to list things she's leaving behind in 2018. As someone who hates making New Year's resolutions, I love this idea.

In 2018, I'm freeing myself from the following:

• Apologizing for or minimizing my achievements. Especially my professional ones, especially for men. I work my ass off. I'm done shrinking myself, so more privileged people can feel better about themselves. Which brings me to...
• Performing emotional labor. With exceptions for: family, partner, close friends, mentees, and other similar relationships. Get yourself a therapist because I won’t be performing this service any more. P.S. diversity and inclusion work counts as emotional labor.
• Caring if people like me. I left a lot of this one in my late 20s, but there's a bit more work to be done if I truly want to free myself from some other items on this list. This isn't an excuse to be an asshole. I don't want to be hated, but there are plenty of perfectly acceptable feelings that fit between hate and like. Respect is the one I'll be trying to aim for.
• Keeping up with every tiny terrible thing that is happening at all times. Regularly stressing myself to the point of exhaustion and negative health consequences because I've turned my brain into some sort of 24-hour bad news network is not sustainable. Apathy is not an acceptable alternative, but there's a middle ground to be found in there somewhere.
• Focusing on my career to the exclusion of my life. I’ve been doing this most of my adult life. I took a hard look at this when I updated my mid-career survival talk for Write/Speak/Code, and I need to start taking my own advice. I can be good at my profession without cannibalizing the other dimensions of my life. Just because we have to work twice as hard to get half as much doesn't mean we should. Finally having "lead software engineer" as my title will hopefully make this easier to manage.
• Men who try to sexualize professional relationships. Sorry (not actually sorry) "nice" guys. I'm sure it's pleasant to mix your professional and dating pools, but the rest of the men ruined it for you (and let's be honest, you probably fucked it up too). If you try to fuck your professional contacts, you're going on a list. Spoiler alert: the list is actually a dumpster, and we'll be throwing you in it with all the other garbage.
• Ironic/hipster *-isms and saying garbage things to get a rise out of someone. I've never really tolerated this, but this year I'm adopting a zero tolerance policy. Not even once with this garbage behavior.