Around September 2019​
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When you are very close to a team, it can feel like the team is a band of brothers. It felt to me that the team storage was cohesive. I felt like their older brother guiding them. Maybe it was because I was the eldest in my family and the second among my cousins on my dad’s side. My parents tell me I led my younger cousins for many years even though I have no memory of it.

Maybe I was recreating this environment to replicate my childhood? Hard to tell.

It’s both a great and a bad thing to be very close to your team. I like to think they would almost trust me with their lives. I felt a duty to protect and lead them. My order of priority was the customers, the team, the company and myself. In afterthought, not healthy. I later learned at immense personal cost what this order of priority would cause.

One metaphor I have been given by a therapist since then is: On a plane, in case of a decompression, there is a reason that they tell you to put your own mask first before helping others. When you are asphyxiating, you can't help others.

Forcing my way forward while trying to carry everything on my shoulders seemed to me like a noble thing to do. An honorable thing to do. This quote of Togusa in Ghost in the shell 2045 sums it up perfectly: “I did an honorable sacrifice, but no one asked me to.”

My relationship with Djazia was upending several things. First she pushed hard at not being on call all the time. A rotation was eventually established. A relationship has ups and downs. Around September 2019 we had a difficult time. It affected me very strongly. All the team felt it. It affected my attitude at work so much that Gaspard privately asked me to split personal and professional life. But by doing that, I closed the doors to the team mates and distanced myself. It would have deep consequences a year later.

I decided at that point that I had to make a decision. Either double down and continue with Djazia or stop. I chose the first. I chose Djazia. And what a good choice I made.

She opened new paths and reflections that I didn’t know existed. I am who I am now thanks to her. I am a much more confident person now. A much more mature adult. I deeply think she was the necessary water and gardening that eventually led me to bloom. But at the time, it was the early phases. Just buds sticking out of the earth.

This was a stressful period for me. Around that time, I got contacted by OpenIO. They wanted to talk.

If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

To pair with :

• PLMV - Médine, Kery James, Youssoupha
• EBADMSG