[exogenousdata]

Preface: I'm sorry to hear that you've been experiencing this. Please try and see a doctor and/or a mental health professional in order to explain what's been going on. I realize that prioritizing self-care becomes even more difficult when you are dealing with a toddler. However your physical & mental health is super important to your child's wellbeing.

What you're describing sounds like an 'intrusive thought'. There are a number of causes for intrusive thoughts including depression (as you mentioned). My best friend has these. It got a lot worse after the birth of their kid. Sometimes an intrusive thought would linger for a week. Things like their toddler getting near a street corner and then an intrusive thought of them getting into an accident with a car.

If what you're experiencing turns out to be intrusive thoughts, there are a number of therapies that can attempt to make these more manageable and give you a greater degree of control over your state of mind. I wish you the best!

[hellojesus]

Thanks for the reply. I've read about intrusive thoughts but discounted that as an outcome because it sounds like intrusive thoughts are generally unwanted and I haven't seen the outsized response documented alongside them. But I could be wrong; I haven't delved into them deeply.

It seemed to me that these could be more related to an "all or nothing" thought pattern because, while the teeth-impact situation is definitely not preferable, the same thought pattern seems to allow me to make more comprehensive and secure software: my thoughts tend towards worst-case scenarios, often discounting completely the probability of that outcome compared to others.

That pattern does seem to present in other areas of my life. I'm currently going through an existential crisis because I never took e&m in school, and now I feel like a fraud so am reworking my way though Stewart's Calculus to be followed by linear algebra, diff eq, etc. through numerical analysis, pdes, advanced calc, etc. so that I can go and redo all of physics through theoretical astrophysics, because anything else would be abject failure. And I am completely worthless, but maybe this will push me into only the mostly worthless category.

And I'm doing this despite what I should be doing, ML engineering and agentic orchestration development, which would be relevant to my actual field and almost necessary given our paradigm shift, because I've now warped my perspective into determining this is a necessary prerequisite. And I can type this and acknowledge this is seemingly irrational, but also the amount of "I need to kill myself if I don't accomplish this" emotional throughput is closer to a firehouse than a drip. Meanwhile all I actually want to do is sit down and work my way through "Cpp Concurrency in Action", because I've also decided I'm a worthless fraud if I only specialize in garbage collected languages.

Idk. Maybe I should see someone. So far I've just been trying to grind all that out in my extremely limited free time with two toddlers and work and a dog while affording wife a nonzero amount of attention.

Edit: I forgot I also am planning to work through ochem because I've also never taken that and am definitely a loser that should be killed unless I can prove any sense of merit by mastering it (though that is admittedly less of a priority).