Ask HN: Feeling Depressed and Choked. How to handle it?
Other posters have already said, this but you are currently in the most demanding and tough phase of being a parent.  Remember you are dealing with<p>1)Sleep Deprivation<p>2)Lower Emotional, Physical and Mental Resilience due to sleep deprivation<p>3)Learning a new set of skills (taking care of a child) while being physically, mentally, and emotionally overloaded.<p>4) Supporting your spouse, who probably has all of above (probably to a much greater degree), plus a hormonal system that is completely out whack.<p>5)Being on the treadmill of nap&#x2F;bedtimes times, pooping, diapers, feeding, and translating a lot of crying too what the baby needs.<p>6)New fights and disagreements at home due to all of the above.<p>Now is not the the time perform a rational evaluation about your career.  To use an Analogy, imagine you find yourself in a burning building.  Is that the right time to wonder about your career?  No - you need to get out of the building first!!<p>Somebody already said this, but the first 2 years of a child&#x27;s life are tough.  The first 12 months are the worst.  Even when your child reaches the point where they sleep 8 hours without feeding, that still means if they go to bed at 8 they wake up at 4 to eat.  So the sleep deprivation lasts well beyond the naive definition of &quot;sleep through the night.&quot;  When your child sleeps from 8PM-6AM and you can get 6+ hours of uninterrupted sleep, that&#x27;s when your mental fog starts to lift.<p>At least for me, I had a child soon after some major or changes in my well-paying job led to me having a horrible manager and even worse skip-level manager.  It was awful because I wanted to be a good dad+husband, but dealing with my job situation almost caused an internal panic about my future.  I definitely felt trapped.<p>What I did was basically said &quot;Until the child is 1, forget all this job stuff.  If you take your job seriously, your family will suffer.  And if you are sleep deprived and cranky, you are not going to succeed at your job.  Do you want to fail at your job and as a parent, or just fail at your job for a while&quot;  When my child was one, I decided to make that &quot;Until your child is 2, forget your job crap.&quot;<p>I ended up taking the full FMLA unpaid, which probably harmed my career at that job.  But given that I didn&#x27;t like my manager or skip-level, my career was not going anywhere anyway.<p>When your child is 2.5, you will be sitting at a restaurant and you will be surprised to realize your child wants to eat by themselves and talk to you.  At that age, some type of daycare (even just part time) is necessary for them to get the interaction they need and many people in the modern world (a nuclear household) can no longer provide.  You&#x27;ll start having some time and mental space.<p>At 33, you&#x27;ve got at least 30+ years left where you can choose to be an entrepreneur.  Your child will be 1 year old in 1&#x2F;30th of that.<p>Finally, one last point.  Many moms don&#x27;t get enough support during this time.  But if a mom gets 20% of the support they need, Dads get 0.  Only a few people asked my spouse how she was doing and provided emotional support.  My wife was the only person who asked me how I was doing.  Nobody else did.