CoRecursive: Coding Stories - Story: The Bug He Couldn't Name - A 15-Year Fight Inside One Developer's Mind

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Imagine facing a problem you can't name, something that feels bigger than any bug you've ever had to fix. How do you debug your own mind when you don't even know what's wrong? Burke Holland's story starts with a college party and a bad trip that leaves a deeper mark than he expects. Sleep gets harder. Fear creeps in. His life starts shrinking. School falls apart, friends drift away, and he ends up back at home trying to understand what's happening to him. He looks for structure in the Coast Guard. Later he discovers computers and realizes he might have found the thing he's meant to do. But the shadow that followed him out of that party doesn't care about career paths. It shows up during college, during work, during marriage, during parenthood. Sometimes it's quiet, sometimes it knocks him completely flat. This is the story of a developer who looks effortless on stage but spent years fighting something no one else could see, and what changed once he finally understood what he was up against.   What do you do when the hardest problem in your life isn't in your code, but in yourself? Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter  

Hello, this is Co-Recursive and I'm Adam Gordon Bell. When you see Burke Holland on stage, he seems born for it. He's sharp, he's funny, he's totally at ease. He's on the VS code team and he works for Microsoft, and he can follow someone like Scott Hanselman at a Microsoft conference and still manage to own the room. You can tell stories, give demos, make it all look easy. And if you saw him doing that, you'd think like, man, this guy has it all together.

But that version is only part of the story. Do you know how many times people sat across the table from me and had no idea that I was just at the end, like just this far from tears, just couldn't even hold it together? Probably would just get in the car and cry on the way home. Then pull it together, go inside, try to be with the family, and then just go take a shower and cry so nobody could hear me. And that's part of the reason why I want to do this podcast is to just kind of share that that has been my experience, that it's so humbling and humiliating that experiences. That is, that's something I'm deeply thankful for, is the ability to see that other people are probably experiencing something similar, or they may be.

And that changes how you see and interact with everybody. So today's show, Burke's going to share some of his struggles. His struggles to hold his life together and his battle with something that he couldn't for a long time even name, something that shaped him as a developer and as a husband and as a father. It all started when he was college age. He was drifting between school and friends. And one night he went to a party and things didn't go well. So we're at a frat house and, you know, we take this acid and then we drive.

We go to a club and we go back to my house and then we leave. We come back to the frat house and I think we, you know, got high at the frat house. At that point we were trying to kind of come down, you know, like I wasn't enjoying it. You know, I'd look in the mirror and see my face and it was real ugly. And I would look at my arm. and I have very hairy arms. So it looked like spiders all over my arms. And so I was just trying not to look at things.

And, you know, I just didn't like it. I just wanted it to end. And so we stayed at the frat house and my friends went to sleep and it just didn't end. And she just kept going. And so sometime around 6 or 7 a.m., my anxiety is just starting to mount, right? Like I'm sort of reaching panic levels. And I drive home, which is quite something. ways and I go home and I can't sleep and I can't calm down and it's just getting worse and I finally

go and tell my parents what's happened and I tell them I need to go to the hospital, you know, that were, I don't remember if I asked to go or if they took me, which was a terrible idea. Like you don't, this is just not a great way to calm down, you know, so they take me and I'm in the ER and I am at this point I am probably having some sort of a psychotic episode, the panic is so high. I don't know how else to describe it other than anybody who's ever been traumatized knows this feeling of you can't run and you can't fight and so you're trapped. It's very hard to describe. And I remember being in the hospital and just, I mean, you're crying and you're writhing and everything that a human being does when they're all senses are maxed. And then I don't

know what they gave me. You know, they gave me something. I know what it was. And the next thing I remember I was in the car on the way home and it was fine yeah and I was in the sense that I was asleep and I slept the way home and I slept the rest of that night woke up the next morning and it took a couple weeks for for me to realize that something was wrong something was way off but something was way off to get why that night mattered so much you need to know who Burke was back in high school before this all happened. Like I did not grow up really with much interest in computers. We had one in my house.

My sister was really into it, but I didn't care much. And we had them in school in the sense that we were learning like keyboarding and office and things like that. But I was not concerned with any of it. And the reason for that is because I was concerned with things like social things. I just wanted to hang out with friends and I wanted to party. and I was in a band at the time, and so we were playing clubs, and I remember I would leave my house,

like my junior and senior year, I would just, everybody would go to bed, and then I would just crawl out the window, and my older friends would come pick me up, and we would go, and we rented a practice space, and everybody just get high, and, you know, you're in a band, it's exactly what you think it would be.

Maybe Burke was too carefree back then, but after the acid trip and after the hospital stay, everything changed. He moved back in with his parents, nothing felt good, nothing felt the same, and he had a hard time finding his footing. The thing that happened was that I just became terrified that I would not be able to sleep. And I don't know where this comes from. I don't know. It was triggered like a couple weeks after when someone mentioned to me that they had been having trouble sleeping. And somehow, somehow this

triggered, it was either that or the set of events, you know, I don't know how it all comes together. Like even when you go back and you try to like do, you know, forensics on this stuff on mental health, it's really hard to identify. All you can really do is identify like the moments that are etched in your memory. And so I began to not be able to sleep and then become just terrified that I was not going to be able to sleep again. Yeah, you're just thinking about it all the time and you think, well, what if I can't get to sleep? And then what if I never sleep again? and then what if I go, you know, you're just, you're architecting scenarios and realities that don't exist. They exist in your mind, but they're not real.

But you don't know that. They're real to you, right? The possibility is real to you. And it just escalates. And you can't run from your own mind. Again, I don't know how else to describe it. It's probably obvious to people from the outside. But when you're in it, it is not obvious.

And you cannot tell what's real from what isn't real. The primary fear that you have is you're going to go crazy, right? Like, that you're just going to lose your mind because it feels like you are. And so that feeling is just terror. Like even as I talk about it, my blood pressure, I don't know, it's probably way up. I don't know. And so you just become to where you can't function, right? Like I just stayed at home and would read like chicken soup for the soul books.

I don't know if you remember the chicken soup. Yeah. Yeah. I would read these books and just, I was just at home, right? wasn't at school, I couldn't work. Like, I'm just at home, like a child almost, you know, and at this point, I'm 19 years old, 20 years old. Because those books were literally chicken soup for the soul, like, or? You're just, yeah, you're just trying to find anything to, like, comfort yourself to soothe. And I think my mom had a bunch of them for some reason, maybe like she was really into

him or something. That was my life for maybe, like, two or three months. And, I think, I'm a And then I just thought something has got to change. And so I thought that, so I had lost, at this point, I had no friends. It's astonishing how fast people don't want to hang out with you anymore when you're not doing any of those things. Right. So like I didn't want to be out late. I didn't want to do, I didn't want to drink. I didn't want to do any drugs.

I wouldn't do any of that stuff. And so nobody really wanted to hang out with me. And I couldn't hang out with anybody anyway. So no friends. couldn't work, couldn't go to school. On the outside, Burke just looked worn out, maybe a bit depressed. He had dark circles under his eyes.

He always seemed a little bit tired and he couldn't stop worrying about whether he'd sleep that night. But inside it felt much worse. He was really struggling and he was sure that he was on the edge of losing his mind. And Burke needed a way out.

He needed structure. He needed something to break the cycle so he signed up for the Coast Guard. And I thought that I would face the same. thing, whatever the thing is, right? So like the fear that I'm not going to get back to, that I'm not going to sleep again. But this actually doesn't work, right? So I'm in the military, but I'm, I'm functional, but I'm not getting better. But I'm in a way distracted. I was still

self-isolating sort of like in the barracks. I have friends again. I'm working with people again. I'm more functional than I was when I was at home. Right. So I'm, I've improved, but I'm still struggling, right? And it comes in cycles. So it would get bad, I'd get obsessed with it. And then it's almost like you forget about it. And then you don't want to talk about it because you're afraid that if you do, you'll bring on the thing. Like even now, I don't like to talk about it because I'm afraid I'll bring it on. Right. And so, but then when you do that, you're sort of giving it a power that it shouldn't have. It's almost like Voldemort. Like, we just won't talk about it. If the name gets mentioned, then we're all in trouble. The silence became

part of it. For him, it was like a shadow. It was always just out of sight, something he was scared to face. And when it faded, he tried not to think about it, worried that even a glance towards it might bring it back. And when you can't look at something, you can't understand it. So the shadow, this Voldemore that he couldn't name, it kind of stayed in control. And right in the middle of that messy, uncertain stretch of his life, he did one small thing that would change quite a bit. and I bought a computer. And I don't even know why. To this day, I went to Office Depot, which used to be how you bought computers back in the day.

I bought like a compact pavilion or something. Brought at home, set it up. And I was the only person in the barracks with a computer. And it had dial-up connection. And I spent a lot of time in that room self-medicating with alcohol and just like on that computer. and I loved everything about it. I loved, it was Windows 98, and Windows 98 had all of these great themes.

The one that sticks in my mind is, there was one that was like a time traveler theme, I want to say, I can see it in my mind to this day. All these amazing themes that would change, like the way the windows looked, it would change the icons. And I was just fascinated by the fact that there's like buttons

and there's these windows and they overlap. And there's, there's, you can close the window or you can open it again. And, and like, UI to me is just the most. And so I would just spend hours just in Windows menus. It's just like clicking through Windows menus. Changing themes. And this was my first introduction to computers and really being fascinated. I didn't realize until later that's what I wanted to do. But one of the first things in my life that I was just utterly fascinated with, I just couldn't get enough of it. And to this day, I cannot get enough of specifically really good user interface.

So Burke leaves the Coast Guard and he heads back to school. And then something happens that pulls them deeper into software. There was someone that I had a crush on. And they were an information systems major. So we were friends. They were like, you should change your major. And I just did it because that's what you do when you're in your 20s. And someone you like tells you that you should do something.

You just do it. You don't think about it. You just go down to the, to the whatever office it is where you change your major. So I did that. And that was like the start of me realizing, oh, this is absolutely what I want to do for the rest of my life. I took C++, you know, I took database relational systems. And I just loved everything about it. Just everything was amazing.

And at that time, we had computer labs and we had Macs and PCs. And that was the only place to get a high-speed internet. connection. And when we coded, we used PICO. I don't know if people remember PICO, P-I-C-O. And then you would print your code out on a D-Matrix printer and submit it. Teacher would literally go through line by line, you know. And so that was my college experience. Around that time in college, after he switched majors and he found a field he liked, he met the woman that would later become his wife. And her support made everything feel more solid, and he really started to settle in.

And so I went from making, you know, like a 2.5 GPA to like a to like a 3, 35, 36, 37. I think I graduated with like a 35, just depending on the semester. But I was just killing it, right? Because I was no longer worried about external validation. I had it. I had it. And so I was able to really focus. And I learned that I was good at things.

And I always thought that I wasn't very smart growing up. My SAT scores were not great. My high school GPA was not great. And then I found out that when I applied myself, oh, I can actually do these things. I think it was still there. It would come and go, but certainly much less so because it was such an exciting time in my life. And there's times throughout my history where you would think, well, oh, I got over this. I'm better, right?

no, then it just comes back. Just randomly. Almost randomly. You know, you look for, it just kind of sneaks up on you and you're like, why now? And you want to pin, you want to attach it to something. You want to be like, well, you're stressed out about that. If you just get rid of that thing, then it'll go away. And the truth of the matter is, it just didn't seem to be pinned on anything.

It would just come and go like a phantom. Just show up and torture me for a couple weeks or months and then just leave. I hear like, okay, well, hope that doesn't happen again. And of course, early on, you don't know what's going to happen because you never dealt with it before, so you don't know if it's going to come back. You just assume maybe it won't come back. And it comes back. That was the pattern.

The shadow would show up out of nowhere, sometimes hitting hard, sometimes barely there. But life kept moving forward, and this calm never stuck around for long. And then he and his wife had kids, and things got harder. Suddenly, stress was at a whole new level. One of the things that my mom told me before we had kids is that having a kid is like getting hit with a 100 pounds sack of gold, right? Like it's super valuable and also like incredibly painful because you have to like take a step away from each other to make room for a child. There's not just two of you anymore. Now there's a third one.

That was hard for me. And also because kids are stressful. Like they just are. But there's no other way to put it. And then we had a two-year-old, then we had a set of twins. And so now we have three children under the age of three. Right. And this is when it just starts to get really, really bad.

It's stressful at my house all the time. There's, you know, nights are hard, days are hard. Work is stressful. I'm a junior in my level at work. I'm working in a healthcare company. Then I worked in a startup. and I worked at a restaurant company. And all I can really do, like it's just getting worse and worse,

is all I can really do is just kind of go to work, sit in my cube, try to work eight hours, and then go home and try to function as a parent. For years, it was the same routine, a new therapist, new meds, but no real answers and no real progress. And meanwhile, life just keeps moving. Yeah, I mean, I'm just in a cube, you know, working at a company. that owns restaurant chains. That's what they do. And I'm working in there. I'm one of the programmers and I'm just in there just under the fluorescent lights and the tan cube walls. And it would just stare

at the screen or the wall for like, I don't even know how long. And then I'd go outside at lunch and just like walk around or drive and then come back and do the same thing. And that was my day, you know? And sometimes I could be productive if I wasn't really suffering. When I wasn't really suffering. I'm very, I could be very productive and I was, I was good. It was a good coder and I like code and I like software a lot the way it goes together. And so I think those times kind of carried me through the dips. You're like, how can you be a good employee if you're not doing anything all day? Well, you can't. But if you're like me, I'd go through these like peaks where I would just like kill it, right? Like I'd rewrite the whole, you know, hiring software system and get us off an

Oracle and I dip. But that's okay, because I just did this thing. And that was essentially how I got by, you know, and kept my job in the meantime. But just barely, just barely. Was it like a refuge at all, like the coding? No, there's no refuge. And I think that's the thing that's so bad about it is there's no escape. There's nowhere to go.

It catches me. I struggle with it for a couple months. It goes away, then it comes back. I'm on medication. I'm going to therapists. I'm trying to figure out what's wrong. Nobody, everybody I talked to is like, this is really bizarre. I've never heard about anything like this before.

I even had one, I went to see a therapist one time and he was like, oh, man, this is, yeah, I don't think this is fixable. I was like, I don't think you should tell people that. But, yeah, it's just escalating and escalating. There was one therapist that I went to see one time. and she had a book. So I went to talk to her and it was like the first time you see when you talk to a therapist for the first time, you have this like longer session.

They're trying to figure out like what's wrong with you. So she gives me this thing, this book and it's called the anxiety and phobia workbook. And she gives it to me and says, I want you to take this. And she's like, bring it back to our next visit. If you keep it,

I'm going to charge you for it. Right. And this is back when I didn't have a lot of money. And so I think it was like $20 book. And it was like, I didn't have that. And so I took the book and went back, I think, the next week or two weeks later to see her, and she was gone from that location, didn't have her office there anymore. This is not uncommon in mental health for a therapist to just leave, especially if it's your first visit, right?

She has no, right? And so, like, people just get in and out of their profession. There's, like, no real, it's just kind of the Wild West. Same thing is true for providers, like, who give you medication. Like, they just leave. and then you had to find someone else and yeah, that's just how it is. But what's interesting is

that book, maybe five years later, became the first thing to actually helping me get better. For a long stretch, though, this was just another object, just another book on the shelf. And before it could ever help him, things actually got

a lot worse. And through it all, one thing about this problem made it harder. Yes, not knowing what a thing is is the worst part. Like, how are you supposed to combat something or how are you supposed to fix a problem that you can't identify? It's kind of like just having a bug in software and it's like you could fix the bug or you just like hope it doesn't happen again. But like the latter is not a great strategy because it's almost certainly going to happen again. And that was my strat for like the first 15 years. It's just like hope the bug doesn't

reemerge and it just does over and over. And that bug, that thing that he couldn't name, it could still show up when life was supposed to be simple. Sometimes that's when it got the loudest. Yeah, I distinctly remember we took the kids and we went down to Chattanooga, which is down the road for like a weekend. And, you know, we went down and it's just chaotic and the kids are babies and they're small and my wife is super stressed out, you know. And what if I can't sleep? I'm going to ruin this whole trip, you know, and then I can't sleep at night. And then you're just a zombie the next day and it just gets worse. and it just gets worse.

Every day that goes by, it just gets worse. It's a compounding problem. Your anxiety goes up and then you can't enjoy the vacation. You don't enjoy the kids. You don't enjoy being around anybody. I don't talk when I get like that. Like I get a very, my wife will describe it as like a deer in the headlights look in my eyes. And I just don't really say anything.

And so you just become no kind of father, husband. And all you really do, you just kind of sink into yourself and you just, want to escape. You just want to run. And that's that I remember, just think I remember that. And that, that's just an example of how it was in my life just all the time, all the time. Like, did your wife try to, I don't know, like shake you out of it or, hey, you got to pull it? You got to pull it together. Yes. Right. Yeah. I remember, you know, she didn't know what to do. Obviously, for those of people out there who love people who deal with mental illness and are, and are not themselves, have never dealt with it. It doesn't make any sense. And when you look at it from the outside,

you're like, this isn't real. None of this is real. Like I see why in your mind you think it's real, but it just isn't real, so just stop doing it. But of course, you can't tell the person that. And so it's just really, really hard for people that are married to these folks because they have to deal with this. They have to deal with this irrational loop that this other human being is stuck in. And there isn't anything that they can do to help you. They can't save you. And I think I wanted her to in some way, but she couldn't. Was there things she tried or you had to just be like, this is not helping me? I would, I think I would talk about it and she would just get exasperated, you know, at some point.

We got small kids, you know, she's a young mother. She just can't. And that, you know, all of that kind of came to a head at, in probably about 2009, 2010. when the whole marriage just kind of almost fell apart for a litany of reasons. But certainly that has something to do with it. So we have three children. They're two, two, and four. I'm at work, but I'm an anxious wreck when I'm outside of work.

I'm kind of non-functional. She's trying to keep up with all of these, with the kids and trying to function herself. And she's desperate to have some sort of an escape. And so I didn't think we were going to make it. Right. So we're in the middle of this terrible situation where we're not even, we're not living together. The kids are young. They're young.

They're so young, you know. And it's just thing piling on top of thing. And my anxiety is just, and you just get to the point where you're like, I can't, I can't deal with this. Like, every human being has a breaking point. I can't function at work. I can't function at home. Like, you can't live this way. marriage is falling apart.

You said you weren't living together? No, for a little while we were, I mean, on and off. Yeah. The first maybe like three to five years, three years were pretty good. It was just her and I, so it wasn't a lot of added stress. But then when you add stress on top of the thing that you're dealing with, you just get worse and worse. You just get worse. You can't deal with anything on top.

You can barely deal with yourself. You can't deal with anything else. And of course, as a parent and as a spouse, people need things from you. And so as those things mounted, I just became progressively worse. It was just really, really mad. Havily medicated. At some point, I'm on like really heavy medication, just like, which would be like Seraquel.

These are like antipsychotics just to try to keep you from coming unraveled because they don't have answers for you. So they just try to give you enough meds to, like, what does it? it takes to get this person to calm down? That's essentially the solution that we have. But then they turn you into a zombie, right? These meds rob you of your ability to be creative. They rob you of your mental agility. They rob you of your ability to create emotional connections with people. They rob you of so many. You have to give up so much. And it's not a great deal. And it certainly is not a solution. It's a bandaid and a bad one. Antipsychotics in general.

Just meds in general, right? They help, but they are not a solution. And I think all of us want that. It's like, give me the pill that fixes the problem. And especially if you're anxious or depressed, you desperately want that. And medication can help you, but it can't fix you. And for a long time, that's what I was looking for. I thought for sure.

I'd seen a lot of episodes of House, right? So I knew that everything was fixable. Like what is the turning point for the marriage? I mean, there's ultimatums, right? There's, I'm, you know, this is over, fine, this is what you want, and this is, I don't want it either. And you stop trying and you get angry and you go to therapy and one person's trying and the other person doesn't really care.

They act like they're trying. They're not being honest. But that was extremely traumatic for me in the sense that you just see everything that in your life just crumbling before your eyes. That's a hard feeling to describe. where everything isn't, nothing is real, nothing is what you thought it was,

everything is, it's hard to describe. It's like everything is a lie, right? It takes from you, somebody once said, like when you have a relationship that's failing or has failed,

it takes your past, your present, and your future, right? Because it takes all the memories and it destroys them. It takes the plans that you had for today

and it destroys them. And it takes the plans that you had for tomorrow and it destroys them. And I thought that was the case. And then you get to decide together whether or not, having seen each other at this terrible point, do you want to keep doing it? And I'm very thankful that both of us were like, yeah, let's keep doing it. And that's, there isn't a moment, right?

you basically put it back, you start to put it back together and then like the next year is a little bit less worse than the previous year. And you just keep doing it and you just refuse to give up. And then eventually one day you wake up and you're like, wait a minute, I have the best marriage in the world. How did that happen? What happened? This thing used to be a nightmare. What happened? I don't know.

It's a magical, incredible thing. And I don't wish that, I don't wish that anybody would go through these things, but people do go through these things. It's just life. But also, I'm thankful that we went through that, Adam. Again, this is going to sound bizarre, but like, I love her more now than I ever did before because I know her really, really well. And I've seen who she really is and, like, how she'll behave, like, when the chips are down, what the priorities are. and I find her to be an incredibly impressive human being, incredibly impressive. And I feel fortunate to be married to her. And I think that we have a bond that you can only have if you've done that together. And so it was during this time that it kind of galvanized me a little bit, and I was like, I am not going to live like this. And so I just started to look at this situation and be like, how do I fix this?

And so I begin that that workbook was the first thing I got my hands on and I read the whole thing front to back. This was the same workbook from years ago, the one that therapist had given him and then vanished. And all this time it had just sat on his shelf untouched as life move on. But now it was waiting, waiting for him to finally pick it up. You're sort of filling out these pages going through. And as you work through, you're just sort of like whittling down. It just starts really generic. And you're just like whittling down, whittling down.

No, it's not that. So I'm going to rule out depression. I am not depressed. I'm reading through all of the symptoms and all of the things. Like only two of those apply to me. That's not it. Right. And you're just whittling down and figuring out what it actually is.

And then once in the book, once you whittle it down in the workbook, then it will direct you and say, okay, this is you. You need to go to this section. And in that section, it will describe the therapies and the things that will work and help you. But until you actually figure out what's going. on because do you have anxiety? Do you have depression? Are you bipolar? Do you have social anxiety disorder? And for people that are anxious, you just, you have to work through it. There's no other way to

describe it. You don't know what's going on. You just know that you're miserable. This workbook will help you figure it out, pin it down. And it may not be what you think it is. That's the other thing. I thought I was depressed. I was told I was depressed. And I did every exercise in there. And I found, I was able to diagnose and figure out what's wrong with me. Okay, I have obsessive-compulsive disorder and I have trauma. And these two things, the rumination and the trauma are causing this. Here are the medications that will help. One of them was lexapro and the other was benzodiazepines.

So for the first time since that night at the frat house, the shadow wasn't just a feeling. He wasn't just fighting fog. Now he could point to it. He could give it a name. instead of just fear he had options. It turned out to be undiagnosed OCD, the ruminative kind, where your mind can run in circles

where it can get stuck in a feedback loop. After more than a decade of guessing and of white-knuckling his way through life, he finally had a map, he finally had a name and some levers he could pull. So I go to the doctor and I get on those medications and I immediately get better, way better, right? I mean, I go from being,

borderline non-functional to like 80%. I just whoop. And it's phenomenal how quickly that happened after I was able to figure out what it is and get the medication that actually helps solve the problem. So lexopro helps with the rumination and benzodiazepines help with the sleep. There's some tradeoffs there.

Benzos are not great for you. They're highly addictive, extremely effective at what they do, which is to just knock the anxiety out. For the first time since its early 20s, things started to get better. The fear was still there. The shadow didn't disappear, but now he could sleep. He could think straight. He could show up for work. He could be present in his life. And from that steadier place, things changed. I'm finding exercise and exercise really, really helps.

Like, years. Like, you have to be able to get it under control before you can figure out, oh, exercise actually helps a whole lot. And it actually, when you feel the worst is when you got to do it. that's when you actually need to do it. Yeah. So I'm getting better. I find meditation, like mindfulness, and the idea of noting, which is that you just sort of name the thing. You're like, well, that's anxiety or that's worry.

It's unpleasant. And then you move on. And that's how you deal with rumination. You don't try to run from it. You just acknowledge that it's there. It being there is not a problem. You say what it is, and you move on. And that was an eye-opening concept for me.

No one had ever taught me that. That like, yeah, it's okay to ruminate. This is how you do with it. It's a simple exercise. It's so funny that the solutions that we find in life, and this is generally true in technology as well, are actually pretty simple. And in retrospect, when you look back, you're like, why did no one see that that's obvious? It's obvious now.

But at the time, yeah, it was not. Once he had a name for what he'd been fighting, things started to change. The diagnosis was right. The medication fit. and he had tools he could use. His life started to rebuild. His marriage got stronger. His work became something

he could actually keep up with. And so I started going to conferences. Like, I would just apply to speak at conferences with no sort of experience whatsoever. And they'd be like, yeah, come on speak. So I'd travel. I'd go speak on just various things. And that's how I met a guy

and he hired me into this evangelism role, which I turned out once I got this thing off my back, I was really good at. I was never a great. I was never like a brilliant coder in the sense that like I couldn't build. I wasn't going to build an operating system, right? I'm not Linus, but I'm good, but I'm an even better communicator. And those two things together are a very unique role in our industry where we have people

that are evangelists, advocates, developer relations, whatever you want to call them, who can articulate product value in simple terms and form relationships within the community. And I was good at that. Yeah. So the first like real talk I gave, like as an advocate, I'd done some like one or two prior and then I was hired pretty quickly. And they sent me to Canada to Microsoft Tech Days. And at this point, I'm working for like a partner company called Tilaric.

And I go up there and I have a talk and I'm right after Scott Hanselman, who is Microsoft's like, he's probably one of the best to ever do this job. If you never seen him speak, it's incredible. Right? Like, just his ability to tell stories is, it's just remarkable. And so I had to go on after him. And so that was daunting, but I did okay. And then they said, can you do another session?

And I didn't have another session. So I literally was like, I think I can just wing it for an hour. And I winged it for an hour and then had people come up and be like, that's the best session of the conference. And that's when I realize, I'm like, okay, I have something here. Right. I can do this. And then throughout that time, I'm just meeting all kinds of people because I'm flying all over the place.

I'm everywhere. Like, I'm going, you know, and I'm doing things I never would have done before, like flying through the night, just going days without sleep because that's what happens when you travel to Europe. Like, it just blows you up, right? And I'm still struggling with it. It's not gone, but I can deal with it. I can work with it.

It's still there. It's still not gone to this day, right? It's still there. But, like, the intensity is at a point where it's like you can deal with it. And because you know what it is, it isn't scary. You know what it is and you know that it's going to go away. And so you're like, okay, and you just kind of, it's not going to hurt you. And so I kind of keep moving up.

And eventually I get hired. Somebody went to Microsoft and said, do you want to come interview? So I went out and interviewed and was hired on to their Devrel team. And then I've been working with the VS code team for the last six years, maybe five or six years? That's the cool thing. Burke isn't good because he never struggled. He's good because he figured out how to live with the parts himself

that used to take over everything. And so I asked him if he could talk to his 20-year-old self back in those first sleepless nights, what would he say? So much stuff that I think I'd say that would have been comforting to know along the way. So the first one is, you're not alone. This is so common. It's extremely common.

People have it all the time. you don't need to be ashamed. The fear of not being able to sleep again is extremely common, right? Fear of social interaction is extremely common. Fear that you're not going to do a good job at work or you're not going to be a good spouse or your relationship's going to fall apart is extremely common. If you have obsessive tendencies, then you're going to ruminate. That's going, and you're going to fixate it on the thing.

You're going to be looking for things that could go wrong. And you're going to ruminate on those things in architect, what if scenarios that don't exist. So that's number one. You're not alone. The second thing is none of the things that you think are going to happen are going to happen. Literally none of them. And if they do, they won't happen the way that you think that they're going to happen. Like you've set up this whole narrative in your head. And even if there's truth in there, which there most likely isn't, I've been, I'm 47 now. I can tell you things never play out like they do in your mind, ever. It's not going to be So you can just discard that scenario.

The scenario that you've just architected in your head is not going to happen. Here's something else, Burke realized. A lot of this fear, this shadow feeling that kept him up at night, came from worrying that he was losing his mind. He couldn't sleep because he was afraid that he couldn't sleep.

And that made everything worse. But then he learned this thing that made the fear shrink. This is a common, very common thing. If you were losing your mind, right, and we have people who have conditions where they have lost, actual connection with reality.

They don't know that they have lost an actual connection with reality. So the fact that you're asking that question means that that is not happening. And I think that you should take comfort in that fact for people who are listening or dealing with this. You just know that. It's not happening. It's not going to happen because you're asking the fact that you're asking a question means it isn't happening.

And then I think I would tell people that it probably seems hopeless. Like, it's never going to get better. Shoot, man. I was like, starting when I was 20. I was probably like mid-30s before I started. That's 15 years before I started to get better. But it will. But you have to do the work yourself.

But you have to pick up in the book and figure out what it is. What is wrong? What's going on? You have to self-diagnose. There's a lot of people that are going to listen to this and be horrified that I'm saying this. but I just did not get any help from therapists and doctors. You can talk to your blue in the face.

They do not understand what you're going through. I just don't think we have good mechanisms for doing that. I'm sure there's good therapists out there. I never found one. But you know you. And if you start to look at the thing, you have to look at the thing. People don't want to look at it. You don't want to look at it because you're afraid it's going to make it worse.

And it may. But you have to do it because only you can fix it. No one is coming and it's going to say, here's what's wrong. Do this, do that, do that, do that, and you're better. That just, I don't think that's coming for anyone. You have to do it for yourself. And you should do it for yourself. You deserve that.

People who are anxious and depressed often feel ashamed. And like it's their fault. It's not your fault. And these are things that you have to do alone. No one can go with you. When you're dealing with mental illness, nobody can really go with you. You have to do that alone. When you look at Burke's life now, it's hard not to see how much of it grew out of that very thing he was trying to outrun.

Again, all this is cliche. This like diamonds are formed are formed in the heat. You notice like these sayings that people throw around there like on coffee mugs and like signs at Hobby Lobby. And it's like, what are you talking about? There's truth in them. But the truth is it's painful. It's not fun. It's not a coffee mug.

It's just like tears. and suffering, to be able to say that like everything happens for a reason. And behind that, there's just untold human suffering. And one of the things that always frustrated me is that I am now and have always been fairly religious, right? And since I'm in church every Sunday, I was raised that way. And so if you are that way, then you're looking and saying, like, well, where is my peace? If there's a God and he loves me, why am I like this?

And you would go to church and they'd say like, well, you know, this verse says don't be anxious about anything. You know, put your faith in God. And then you just feel like it's your fault. It's your fault, certainly, right? And everybody who goes through these things has this says this. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be illness. It could be a broken relationship.

It could be abuse. It could be anything. And it feels deeply deep. deeply, deeply unfair, and it is. And I would say, I'm still quite religious. Don't think that the point of religion is for you to be happy. And in fact, the more that I read about it, at least in the Bible, that is not at all the promise that you're going to be happy. You may not get relief here. But at the same time, I have gotten relief, haven't I? It's been wild, certainly professionally for me.

the sense that I get to work on this amazing product and I get to be at the forefront of AI in a place where AI is actually pretty good, which is in writing code. And like, what does that look like? And trying to help figure that out because it's so early and I don't think everyone quite knows where this is all going. So to be at the forefront of that and get to work with this team and watch them do that has been an incredible opportunity. And I never would have had any of that.

If I hadn't, I mean, if you back, track it, like, everything gets you to where you are today. So if I hadn't had that night that changed my life, if I hadn't suffered, if my marriage hadn't almost fallen apart, would I be here where I am today? I consider myself the most fortunate person in the world. I don't deserve any of this. It's trite. It sounds like I'm saying everything happens for a reason. I don't want to say that because that's so cliche. But I am thankful for all of those things in a very bizarre way. I mean, if you ask my mother, if you went to my mother and said, you know, what's your take on this? Like, I've gone way further than anybody ever thought that I would.

Is that a curse or is that a gift? I view it as a gift, and I'm thankful that God gave me that. And I can say that honestly. That was the show. Thank you so much, Burke Holland. Amazing for sharing so much. You know, Burke talks about his mental health, about his, anxiety about his OCD in a calm matter-of-fact way, but that's not because it's gone,

but because he took the effort to face it, right? He used the workbook. He got the right meds. He made his life better. And because of that, these days, he's just on a sliver of benzos and a very small dose of Lexbro, but he did want to add, if you ever consider going down the Benzo route, to be very careful, they can be addictive. But thank you, Burke. And what I keep coming back to is that line he used about bugs for 15, years, his strategy was basically, you know, I don't know what causes that bug, but let's hope it doesn't happen again. And then it would just happen. The real change happened when he stopped avoiding it, when he looked straight at the thing that he'd been treating like Voldemore,

and he faced it, and he started figuring out how to respond differently. Giving a presentation, Burke seems like a natural. He's charming and funny, and maybe he is a natural. But what I think that matters is that because he spent years living with this shadow, living with this pain, and yet still building a career and rebuilding a marriage and building a family, he learned how to spot this kind of pain in others. He learned this empathy. And that's not something you're born with. That's something that you earn and that you learn and that he learned the hard way.

So thank you, Burke, for trusting us with your story. This isn't a mental health show. But if you're struggling, I'm sure Burke would recommend the anxiety and phobia workbook. And until next time, thank you so much for listening.