I almost forgot who I was — A story

May 16, 2024

I worked at Tesla for 4 months. It was a true test of my ability to work hard and get shit done at a world-changing company, but I sacrificed a lot of who I am in the process.

Spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day on something that you don't love and thinking that you won’t lose some of yourself along the way now seems laughable to me in retrospect. But at the time I didn’t know how to escape this hellish environment I had co-designed for myself.

I did accomplish a lot at Tesla. Within my first week, one of the full-time employees on my team was transferred, so I took on most of her responsibilities. This role included being the main engineering fleet point-of-contact within the company for the entire Model 3 / Model 3 Performance vehicle program. When I concluded my internship at the end of April, my boss shared that she didn’t expect me to take all that responsibility on and was surprised to hear various engineers’ concerns about who would replace me.

I also built internal tools — way outside my job description — that my team had been wishing they had for years. I cannot say the countless barriers I had to go through to deploy code while being in a non-engineering role. I’ve never experienced so many constraints in my life — which surprised me for Tesla. Every time I was hit with a new one (“your solution must securely implement SSO”) I pushed back, then ultimately found a new way when no one would budge.

On Microsoft Teams, I was pinged by hundreds of engineers and business stakeholders from NA, Europe, and Asia throughout day and night. Some responses only required 5 minutes of attention. Other tasks took 5 days' time to have conversations with 20 different people within the company to find the right answer. I learned how to get what I needed out of a very chaotic environment.

Meanwhile everyone who approached me who saw “Tesla” on my LinkedIn cheerily asked “You work at Tesla! That must be really cool, right?”

Yes, it was cool. It was exhilarating, in fact. To see the inner workings of thousands of people rallying together to build the next generation of electric vehicles, energy systems, and AI — and be able to say, “Hey, I’m part of that” is a huge fucking thrill.

But it wasn’t for me.

I’m someone who is very obsessive over the things I do. I grew up as a perfectionist, always thinking about “What is the very best way that this could exist?” for pretty much everything. Unfortunately, my limitation is that I usually can only do this for one thing at a time.

While at Tesla, I was only Tesla. I pretty much only talked about work, surrounded myself with people at work, and when I got home around 10pm each night I researched what I could do to improve my work.

I made a point of going up to SF from Palo Alto on weekends where my friends were building startups, going on adventures, or being part of new programs like The Residency and Buildspace SF2. This worked for the first two months. When I was with these friends I felt like I was me again, the kid who just wants to explore. Starting Playspace (the SF Socratica node) with a few of them helped me with this. But each week it got harder and harder to revert back to being “me” on the weekends, until eventually I stopped going to SF altogether in my last month.

24 hours a day of Tesla was taking a toll on me. I started waking up later and later, sometimes spending hours in bed until I got a ping that required me to be at the office. I stopped biking to work and instead called an Uber to get there 5 minutes faster and justified it with “If I work while I’m in the Uber, it pays for the ride.” I hadn’t even gone to the gym in weeks despite having a gym in the office. Instead, I hid from my feelings of guilt by opening up YouTube the moment I got home.

And yet at one point, about 3-4 months in, I seriously considered making Tesla my life. I knew a return offer would be on the table because my boss always hinted at it, so I started to dream about how I would take the next decade of my life to work my way up the system and transform the company.

I guess there was still a little bit of “me” inside — just a completely different version.

In April I visited Vancouver for Atelier Showcase 2. I hosted its predecessor event back in December and it was the most fulfilling day of my life. This time, I got to watch. Dozens of people were presenting about diving deep into their curiosities: walkable cities, podcasting, comics, and live music remixes of others’ performances. I also witnessed people who I had never met before deliver speeches about how Atelier changed their life.

While in Vancouver I began talking with people again about my passions: community-building, education, and startups. These deep conversations lasted far too long, but I couldn’t get enough of it.

A friend from Atelier shared her struggle to get a proper hold of her life too while stressed from school and work. So we started a “nighttime meditation and no social media” challenge where we had to pay each other a very substantial amount ($500) if we failed on any given day. I failed once and she donated the money to Atelier, which I was pretty happy about.

Returning to Palo Alto for my last 2 weeks of work was tough. But at this point I knew I had had enough. I had my birthday at someone else’s party where no one knew to celebrate me turning 23 at midnight. I went outside to write in my journal instead which honestly made me very happy. The next morning, my best friend and I built an app together ("Muse") just because I was longing to work on something I truly cared about, without all the constant pings and stupid constraints.

When it was time to leave the Bay, I struggled to muster the energy to clean my apartment and pack my stuff. I ubered to the airport but arrived 15 minutes past the deadline to check my bags. The airline employee asked “Why are you late?” and I honestly had no answer for her. I was fortunate for her kindness to let my bag go through, but it was also 20 lbs overweight—a $100 fee. The hundred bucks meant nothing to me as I just needed to get back to Vancouver, so I quickly reached for my wallet… until I realized that I didn’t have it. And it wasn’t that I had forgotten it in my apartment, no. My wallet containing all my ID cards and credit cards (except, luckily, my passport which I kept separate) had just been stolen in Downtown SF earlier that week.

Reading out the digits on my virtual Wise card got me and my bags on the plane. What a relief I felt to be heading back to Vancouver. Switching between 3 cities for school and internships every 4 months had made it difficult for me to consider any single one of them as home, but at this moment, I knew I was heading back to the people I loved. That was home for me.