keep swimming, ask anyway

someone asked me, at the side of a pool, whether i’d ever used oracle.

a question about a database company, asked on a wednesday morning, by someone who had no obvious reason to ask it and asked it anyway.

it threw me. it sent me back through every door i’ve walked through scared, and stopped, hard, at the one i still haven’t.

oracle is who hires you and never lets you go

here’s what oracle is, if you’ve never had reason to know.

it’s a database company from 1977 that never went away. larry ellison read a paper by an ibm researcher called edgar codd, which described a way of storing data in relations rather than in a hierarchy, and unlike ibm he shipped it. that decision is now the floor. the relational database is how a bank knows your balance, how an airline knows your seat is yours and not also someone else’s, how a hospital knows which of two patients with the same name is allergic to what. oracle sells that, and it sells the enterprise software stacked on top of it, and since 2010 it has owned java, the language a very large amount of the above is written in.

none of that is fashionable. the fashion now is to throw out the thing that works and rebuild it over a weekend because the old way felt heavy. but a bank cannot have a weekend where the balances are wrong. so the thing that works stays, and the people who understand it stay with it, and that is the entire quiet economics of the sector.

which is why the phrase i keep coming back to is that oracle is who hires you and never needs to let you go. i’m not being funny about old tech. it’s as close as my industry gets to a lifelong vow: learn the thing properly, and it keeps a roof over your family for thirty years.

throughout primary school, then university, and now whatever this adulthood is, i have kept meeting families whose foundations were poured out of it. a parent goes in young, stays, and the house and the holidays and the kids’ shoes all come quietly out of a stack that never once comes up at the dinner table, because it doesn’t need to. it just holds. the swimming families took me longer to see, because i didn’t grow up in one. i came to the water at eighteen and spent the next eleven years learning to read them from the inside: a boot full of kit bags, siblings scattered across whatever pools their squads happened to train at, a parent doing the early drives and another doing the late ones, all of it running on fuel that a database somewhere quietly paid for. and at the end of it, some small warm ritual waiting at home, the tinned syrup sponge after a late dinner, the thing a kid remembers twenty years on without ever once connecting it to a line of enterprise software. that’s what the stack actually buys. not a payslip. a car with everyone in it, and something warm waiting at the end of a long day in the water.

that’s not a small thing to have done with a working life. i didn’t appreciate it at twenty. i can’t stop appreciating it now.

so nobody asks about oracle casually. you don’t fall for a field. you fall for someone who is at home in one, and the field walks in behind them. there is always a person in the middle.

the question was never about databases. it never is.

the doors

what stayed with me was the nerve.

it takes a particular bravery to ask an honest question about a thing you don’t understand yet. you’re saying, out loud: i don’t know this, i’d like to, and i’ll risk looking like i don’t know it in order to find out. kids do this without thinking about it. we spend our twenties training it out of ourselves.

and i recognised it, because i’ve stood there.

my first internship was at a satellite company. i applied because i wanted to work on rockets. anything with propulsion, anything pointed up. the offer came back for something else entirely: software engineering experience. at the time the word “software” on its own was enough to make me hesitate. i sat there wondering whether it was a mistake. the whole career i have now exists because i walked through a door with a word on it that scared me.

the first client after that was a carpenter who wanted a website. i had no idea what i was doing. i didn’t know what an invoice was. i charged him and felt like i’d robbed the man. that job is now just an early line on a long list, and every name on the list taught me something i still use.

then there was the intern year on old avionics. the kind of technology a cockpit keeps precisely because it already works, and nobody sane gambles a flight on novelty. my interviewer actually closed the interview with it. the tech here is quite old, he said. cockpits build what works and stick with it. are you sure you want to be here?

why not, right.

then i got in, and it was the most freedom i’d ever been handed. full run of an experimental rig. requirement-to-test visibility end to end. at one point i was defining and mapping my own failure modes for an interface unit that never left the conceptual stage, and for a head like mine, all the instruments playing but not quite in time with each other, and no diagnosis yet to name why, that kind of structured freedom felt like being given the keys. i wouldn’t be the engineer i am without that building and the people in it. my plug had no spark before it. anyone who was there and reads this knows exactly where they sit in that diagram, and i owe them more than a paragraph can hold.

every one of those started the same way that question did. somebody decided to be uncomfortable on purpose.

the water was a “why not” too

i should tell you how i got in the pool in the first place, because it’s the same move.

the first time was before university. michael phelps had just done something absurd at the olympics and i wanted to know what the fuss was about, so i got in to see for myself. no plan. just: why not.

the second time was the start of uni, and it was an escape. i’d walked into a wall of aggressively macho student culture, and somewhere around american football i drew a line. i wanted teamwork that didn’t require me to flatten myself to fit it. somewhere i could work on my body, work on my head, and eat a meal without guilt. the pool was right there. why not.

that was early 2014, most of it done alone, training through a quiet summer to have something to show at squad tryouts once freshers week came round. over eleven years ago now, and i never got back out. the committee roles came after, then the qualifications, then the frameworks i’m building on now. all of it traces back to a teenager who couldn’t be bothered to invent a good reason not to get wet.

i qualified to teach eight days ago. my whole life fits in one element at the moment. i teach in the morning, and in the gaps i get back in and swim. laps to spend the spare hours, laps because the water is the one place the noise in my head drops to nothing.

that last bit is the door i haven’t finished walking through.

the noise

i’m going to write about this properly, and soon, and here.

i have adhd, assessed and diagnosed and no longer up for debate. i don’t yet have the shape of what i want to say about it, which is exactly why i’m saying this much now: so that i can’t quietly not write it.

what i can tell you today is that the water is doing a lot of work for me, and the laps are the smallest part of it.

i’m no olympian. i swim slowly, in an empty lane, for my own head. but two of them are worth a line, because they got somewhere long before i understood any of this. phelps has adhd, was told by a teacher he’d never amount to much, and has said since that the water was where his head finally went quiet. i got in the pool at eighteen because a man was fast on the telly. i had no idea we shared any of the wiring under it. and biles, when her private medical records were stolen and dumped online in 2016, adhd medication and all, with a doping smear attached that she had every right to answer and every reason to be angry about, chose at nineteen to say plainly that she had nothing to be ashamed of. i wasn’t ready to be that plain about mine at nineteen. i’m getting there at thirty.

i mention them because they got to the honest part of it long before i did, and it steadies me to know the honest part is reachable at all.

and then there’s the fish

the third one isn’t real, and she’s the one i think about most.

dory has no working memory. she says it herself, near the start: she forgets things almost instantly, it runs in her family, and she has no idea how many people she’s lost along the way that she can’t remember losing. the film plays it light, but that forgetting is the load-bearing wall the whole character stands on.

and here’s what everyone gets wrong about just keep swimming. grit has nothing to do with it. she didn’t invent a mantra to power through. it’s the only move available to a head that cannot hold a plan. she can’t assemble the case for stopping, because assembling anything is precisely the thing she can’t do. so she’s left with the next stroke. and the next stroke turns out to be enough.

it also isn’t hers. in the second film you find out her mother taught it to her, as a song, when she was small. a parent looked at a child whose head didn’t work like other heads and did not try to fix her. she handed her a strategy she could carry without remembering where it came from. that is the most useful thing i know about parenting a brain like mine, and it’s in a cartoon about fish.

and it costs her. she begs marlin not to leave, because with him around she can remember things, and she says i don’t want to forget. he leaves anyway. within minutes the entire journey is wiped. she loses people. she loses them by being what she is, and she doesn’t get to consent to it.

i know exactly what that is. it’s the reason i sit on messages i should have sent, to people i should have sent them to, because i’m afraid my own wiring will scramble the thing i most want to say. she just keeps swimming, and it costs her, and she keeps swimming anyway.

an orchestra that’s a half-beat out from its conductor is a strange thing to run a business out of, and a strange thing to teach children with, and i intend to be honest about both. the players are all good. they’re just not all landing on the downbeat together, and most days the work is conducting a little louder.

because the version of “why not” i wish more adults still had is the one pointed inward. the honest questions about yourself. i wish more people talked plainly about therapy, about the deeply unglamorous work of finding out what is going on in your own head. if you could see the wiring, and maybe even adjust it, why wouldn’t you?

that word still makes people flinch, and i’ve never understood the flinch. the hardest paths in a life come with the same label stuck to them: find a way to carry this, because it’s coming. the least glamorous way is the one that works. say it out loud. to a professional, a friend, anyone. the strategies were never a secret. dory’s mother knew that. we just don’t pass them to each other often enough.

the part i’d rather not write

in case any of the above reads like a man who’s worked it all out: i haven’t. nobody has.

there are things about how i eat i keep meaning to fix. table manners my grandparents drilled into me that still don’t survive the first plate. a standing promise to sort my sleep that renews itself, unkept, every year, and a nail-biting habit i’d sell to a stranger for a pound. i’m nowhere near whatever “sorted” is meant to mean, which is fine, because nobody is. it’s as ordinary as the ground.

underneath the rest is fear.

i’m thirty and i get scared. daily. about things i don’t have words for, in a head where every channel is playing at once and none of them will turn down, which is its own reason the quiet under the water matters as much as it does. some of that fear is useful. it’s the thing that pushed me through every scary door. but i’d be lying if i said it was all the useful kind.

i’m scared of what the get-rich-overnight machine is doing to people younger than me, and the flat grey feeling i think waits for them on the other side of it. i’m scared that “go and play outside” is becoming a sentence kids need translated, that dinner is losing to a screen, that a shelf of books is starting to look, to a small head, like the boring option. i worry, with no proportion at all, about the year the world quietly stops printing enough of them. i worry about the slow adult job of choosing who i want walking into the rest of my life with me. and harder than that, about the people already worth mending things with, where i hold off reaching out because i’m afraid my own wiring will scramble the message and make the wound worse instead of closing it. i’ve left texts in drafts for a fortnight over exactly this, to people i’d cross a city for.

and the big one. that the decent things we’ve managed to build could come apart fast, because a small number of people would rather measure whose button is bigger than admit that ending real, named, human hunger turns out to be embarrassingly payable.

i list it not to frighten you but because naming a fear is the first move through it. the thing i’m trying to build a life around is easy to say and hard to do: walk at the thing that scares you, and watch for the comfort zones closing quietly around you before they set.

and when fear stops being useful, when it gathers and stalls you and pulls you inward, away from people, the move is the least heroic one available.

say it to someone. anyone. the mate spotting you at the gym, between sets, because a rack of weights is somehow easier to talk over than a table. the barber, mid-cut, in the one chair where you’re both looking at a mirror instead of each other. the bloke you half-recognise on the tube, where the whole unwritten contract is that you don’t make eye contact, and breaking it for one honest sentence lands like a small act of rebellion. your mum. the person in the next lane, dripping, before the second set. it does not matter who. it matters that the thought leaves your skull and meets the air, because a fear said out loud is half the size of one kept in.

why not

if there’s an adult whose work you’re quietly curious about: ask the specific question. the nervous one. most of us will answer, and we’ll be quietly thrilled to have been asked something real.

and if you’re the adult: be askable. be the person someone finds when they go looking. that’s where the chain starts, and that’s how a field gets its next person.

there’s a line in we bought a zoo i’ve quietly run a whole life on. a father tells his son that sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage, and something great comes of it.

here’s what i’ve worked out, slowly, at every door i was scared of. most people run the wrong question. they ask can i do this?, and “can i” is just an invitation to list the reasons you can’t. i trained myself onto the other one. i ask “why wouldn’t i”. it flips who has to make the case. suddenly the reasons against have to defend themselves, and most of them can’t.

therapy is the cleanest example i’ve got. as “why would i sit and talk about my feelings?” it sounds like a chore you can always put off. flip it. “if i could understand how my own head runs, and maybe make it run a little better, why wouldn’t i?” put like that, putting it off is the strange choice.

i used to think a head that won’t hold a plan for a week was the thing wrong with me. i’ve come round to reading it the other way. the same wiring that drops the plan is the wiring that walks at scary doors instead of away from them, that gets in the pool because a man was fast on the telly, that takes the carpenter’s website with no idea what an invoice is and figures it out. the man who signed off my teaching plans, examiner’s pen still in hand, looked at me and said my adhd was an absolute superpower, and not to let anyone tell me otherwise. i’m choosing to build on that reading. not because the hard parts aren’t real. because pointing the energy at the next thing is the only use i’ve ever found for it that pays.

so. have you ever used oracle?

yeah. i know people who gave it their whole lives.

i can’t hold the plan. but i’ve always got the next stroke.

keep swimming. ask anyway.

why not, right.