Note by nyanbinary: This post is not by me but a guest contributor, just to avoid any confusion.

Two weeks ago I had a mental breakdown, which lead to me wanting to kill myself seriously enough that my friends strongly urged me to get checked into a stationary psych ward. The process of doing so was annoying stressful and occasionally just deeply stupid but really isn't the point of writing this (tho I would like to thank the work of my friends who tirelessly tried to keep me alive and get me help).

The much more relevant point is: How did I get here? I have had my struggles with suicidal ideation in the past but i had been mostly stable since getting on HRT. The reason for the resurgence is fairly simple (and spoiled by the title): Work.

I work as a Sysadmin/DevOps Engineer for a reasonably large firm in the travel sector. Our entire team is me and my team lead, who, on top of being The Other Admin also has some chunks of the software to work on, and, you know, lead a team. This means I end up doing most of the day-to-day operations, as well as all of the project work to try and drag our infrastructure out of multiple holes that had been dug over the years, and trying to make genuine improvements - one of my final semi-successful projects had been to get permission to set up a Kubernetes cluster for one of our applications).

The problem of course was as it always has to be: maintenance and day-to-day operations start swallowing my entire time. Especially grueling here was a misconfiguration from 2014(!) that lead to us installing an incompatible boot loader on every server, leading to a failure to boot starting with the upgrade to Debian Trixie, making that upgrade a time consuming and high stress process. Both me and my TL had known for months this state was not sustainable, that I ended up being overworked and stressed, but an official hiring freeze was in place for juniors and I had no time to train a trainee anyhow - when, in this whole mess, was I supposed to get a junior up to speed, let alone a trainee who might know nothing?

One of the most critical issues for my mental health is that a lot of urgent tasks would not get done in my absence, because the time, expertise, ... was missing. A stark example of this was my team lead not having the time to look at the basics of Ansible for months despite it already being used in production.

At this point I am, in order of importance

1. stressed to an unhealthy degree impacting my private life

2. overworked to the point that things that needed to get done didn't

3. a critical liability for the company due to a stress induced lack of documentation, meaning a lot of tasks could not be done by anyone else.

I am, quite frankly, a powder keg waiting for a spark, which then was kindly provided by a combination of the German bureaucracy making my life hell for my name change, an ill timed bad cold robbing me of my daily structure and stranding urgent tasks for the shortened Winter Season preparation, and a friend having a work induced mental breakdown bad enough who I helped care for.

She beat me to the psych ward by a whole 1.5 weeks.

There is. Not a lot of genuinely new learnings here.

Make sure your teams are well staffed, especially critical "cost centers" like operations, customer service or security. Make sure to allow these departments to implement changes to make their (and often your!) life easier or more secure. Make sure you still have a company if these people fall sick, or are on vacation (my work is probably having a hell of a time right now and it wont get better. I dont care that much anymore, this is frankly, their own fault).

I probably will be quitting after this.

No job is worth it for me (or if you see yourself in this you) to get this fucked up. I think thats my most important take away.

Talk to a therapist early. Seriously. You need to be able to have an outlet for this. If it gets too bad get a sick note. If even that doesnt help: Quit if you can. Especially if youre in a country where you can claim unemployment benefits if you quit on doctors recommendations. No job is worth your life and its not actually your Infrastructure, you're jut babysitting it.

P.S.

Yes I know it hurts to abandon projects. I will be leaving a lot of things undone. They do not matter more than you.