Day One

While I originally felt relieved to not have to go to a place where it seemed like everyone was against me actually succeeding, this weekend was rough. I stopped focusing on the not having to deal with their bullshit anymore and instead on the being fired. I replayed the moment over and over in my head to see if I could make sense of it. If there was one thing about myself that I was pretty sure of, it was that I am not the type to get fired. I know the type that gets fired: They're impossible to work with or have explosive tempers or sleep at their desk every day or steal the company's projects to sell as their own. You had to do some pretty bad shit to get fired. I had always striven to be the kind of person who no one would consider firing: Working late on ridiculous deadlines, working with project managers when they utterly fail to spec out a project and it's due the next day, being polite to everyone even when they treat me like shit (and then crying in the bathroom), and taking the opportunities I could to hang out and get to know my coworkers at lunch and after work in addition to simply doing my job as well as I could. This weekend I kept struggling with the idea that I got fired. And, while deep down I know there's nothing I could have done to avoid it, I still feel like I've done something horribly wrong. I'd become "one of those people who actually get fired". I'd joined the ranks of the people who got multiple warnings or blatantly violated company policy. Any attempt to claim that I was not one of those people just made it sound like I was trying to spin things.


Everyone says to take time off: my boyfriend, my friends who have been laid off (not fired), my workaholic parents. I don't know if I can. My work was too much of who I am, or I guess, who I was. I need an office to go into every day and projects to work on and problems to solve. I have freelance projects and prospects, sure, but it seems like a cop-out to consider myself a "freelance developer" now.

Because I'm one of those people who got fired. And who the hell gets fired these days??

Learning to Love (Programming) Again

For the past few months I'd been killing myself on soul-crushing projects without actual specs. There were a variety of reasons: Vague clients, rush projects, going through consulting firms. I'd work late and try to read the minds of project managers and clients to figure out what they wanted when there were no designs. It made me learn to hate what brought me the most joy in my professional life: programming. I got bogged down in having to do front end work (either for myself or fixing the work of other developers) so and programming work felt like a chore to learn in all of those projects' abbreviated timelines. And when I did get to program, there was no IA and client needs changed weekly. As a junior programmer, this was nervewracking.

Programming became a source of serious strain. I wanted to do work for my friends where we could actually talk through everything and spec it out properly. I wanted to work with people who wouldn't assume I fucked up when I just had to redo someone else's work. I knew that even if I quit my job and started a new one, the spark might not come back. I needed time off to get back into it, but I'm not the kind of person who can just take time off and "find my passion". I need a safety net. Even taking a week or two off between jobs made me nervous.

But now I finally have it. I just needed someone else to make that decision for me. And I never thought in my life I'd be so relieved to hear "We're letting you go."

Of course I was scared once it hit me as I got home with my bag of stuff from my desk. What was I going to do now? Then I found the answer: Everything.

I'm going to finally make the portfolio site I've dreamed of. I'm going to take on the freelance I'd never had time for. I was going to LEARN things. Become a better programmer. As I failed at closing an old window in my house, I even figured I'd add "finally start working out" to my list. And I'm excited.

Most importantly, I want to get the spark back. That amazing feeling of programming something that works that I have never felt from anything else in my life.

And I'll be chronicling it here, because I always wanted to start a blog and now I finally have time.