Debugging my career path after falling out with life

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When I was a kid, my dad sat me in front of a keyboard and taught me how to build something called a website in a place named GeoCities.

My first site was peak ’90s. I’m not sure the under-construction graphics ever came down. The only thing I constructed was an abomination of GIFs and clashing colors, but I enjoyed the freedom to create.

It kicked off a love for technology that never left me. While my peers hung out at the mall, I stayed home and hand-typed HTML and CSS code into NotePad.

Domains were expensive in those days, but an online friend gave me a subdomain on their site. I taught myself how to use FTP and learned enough Perl to install an early blogging platform called Greymatter.

Having strangers read my blog was the first time I felt heard.

When high school guidance counselors asked me about my career plans, I told them I wanted to work with computers. They said I should focus on a “real job,” not playing around with the internet. Besides, my math grades were bad. And didn’t computers run on numbers?

Every job I held as an adult designated me as the “computer person.” If you had a problem with a spreadsheet or a file that wouldn’t upload, I was the one who could figure out why.

When I had the opportunity to right the wrong of not being encouraged to pursue the career path I had a passion for, I jumped on it.

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Returning to school to learn front-end web development and user experience design at 35 was a proud moment. And because the programming community embraced me, I felt like it was a good decision.

But when I got my first job in tech, the company I worked for was a bad fit. Years of pushing myself too hard paired with a pandemic was a caustic mixture, and I burned out quickly. When I couldn’t sit at my desk without feeling like I wanted to throw up, I knew I had to let the job go.

I planned to take a year off, but my body had other ideas.

My appendix tried to assassinate me. I had emergency surgery and spent nearly a week in the hospital. It took a long time for my energy and mobility to return, extending my sabbatical much longer than planned.

Part of me regrets my career break because the world passed me by. I see others moving on and up, and I’m happy for them.

But I’m also sad for myself. How much further along would I be if my career hadn’t been slapped out of my hands?

The other part of me knows my break wasn’t all bad. I found a great therapist, and I’m now equipped with the tools and self-knowledge to prevent the stress and exhaustion that burned me out and probably caused my body to turn against me.

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When the tech industry chewed me up and spit me out, I thought I was done with web development. But after a lot of self-reflection, I’m starting to put the pandemic years behind me. Not only am I ready to return to work, but I’m also excited about programming again.

I’m starting with training wheels by refreshing myself on a query language I once knew the basics of. I thought I’d suffered major skill degradation since I took a breather, but I’ve been surprised by how much I remember.

Rediscovering my love for coding after a tough career break showed me it’s never too late to rebuild and find your place.

From a teenager creating terrible websites in the glow of a CRT monitor to Army crawling my way through life as an adult, the last few years forced me to rediscover myself.

As I sit here with SQL queries on one screen and this article on another, I hope you see the possibilities in your story after reading about the struggles in mine.

Sometimes stepping away brings us back to what matters.