AI Gave Me a Voice - A Developer's Story of Social Anxiety and Open Source

When I was in kindergarten, my friend and I had an hour-long bus ride to school every morning. We invented a game where we'd pretend to turn a knob on our shoulders that would shut off our emotions. It let us think clearly. It helped us on imaginary space missions when things got crazy. I didn't know it then, but I was already trying to manage my anxiety. I was five years old, building coping mechanisms for something that didn't even have a name in my world. It was the 80s. Nobody talked about anxiety. I grew up watching Star Trek with my dad. I loved Spock - the character who proved you could feel everything and still function, as long as you had the right tools. Looking back, the knob on the shoulder was always the Vulcan way. I just didn't have the vocabulary yet. I started coding when I was 8 on a Commodore 64. I'm 47 now. That's 39 years of writing code. It's also 39 years of almost never talking about it with anyone. I have severe social anxiety. Not the "I'm a little shy" kind.