Holy Crap — I’m Programming Again!

Debugging my career path after falling out with life

Image by Christina Morillo on Canva

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.

Created by the author in Canva

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.

Created by the author in Canva

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.