It’s hard to explain everything that led to meeting this person. From my side you could sum it up to: I let go. I let myself feel the tide instead of trying to control it. As it rose and fell back, I would meet people. I was more comfortable with myself. I enjoyed myself more. This was the change that, for me, made this happen and work.

I met Djazia in February 2018. Little did I know that she would become my wife a few years later. When I look back, we seemed so different yet there was one thing for me that made it click. I was at peace. I felt like myself with her. I didn’t have to be someone else.

I discovered at the time, already 30 years old, that I had invested an unfathomable amount of energy into my tech skills. Hours and hours, days and days, years and years of diving head first into tech. From university and before to that moment, I drank from the tech firehose.

I was almost only breathing tech because it was the most natural thing to me. Tech was deterministic. I could repeat things until I understood what I was doing or what worked. It was much easier for me to write code than to talk to people. I didn’t understand people. I didn’t understand social expectations or social cues. I talked many times about this to my therapist.

But you see, all that time invested in tech was time not invested elsewhere. Building a relationship with someone is not always easy. I can’t rerun the situations or words until I get them right. I can’t ignore social conventions because I don’t understand them or because they don’t make any sense. The only way to make it work is to invest time in the relationship itself. Ask questions, be open minded, try to find commonalities and respect differences.

I had run my life like a computer. I had added component after component to it. But… Life isn’t a computer, it’s living, breathing, you have to feed it, nurture it and grow with it.

This start is an invisible inflection point in my life. It took a while to bubble up but once it did, nothing could be the same. Before meeting her, there would be sparks like when two metal pieces clash together. This time, it was different, it was a slow friction welding process.

But, how do you explain to non-tech, or even tech people, that sometimes you have to go to an underground nuclear proof bunker? A place 30 meters (~100 feet) under Paris?

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(1) https://x.com/Scaleway_fr/status/969634754235682816

(2) https://x.com/Scaleway_fr/status/623940017786851328​
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If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

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To pair with :

• Territory - The Blaze
• Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée) by Simone de Beauvoir