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Thankful for the Worst Damn Year of My Life
In a year that kept me asking — have I reached rock bottom yet? Also put me through every worst thing I could think of happening to me… and I survived. Why this horrible year of unemployment, broken promises, heart ache, and survival has earned my gratitude.
That when I was fired on November 22, 2021 from a lucrative cyber security position and realized that nobody else had my own best interests in mind other than myself and my partner, I decided to leap head first into full stack development. While I had years of WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace, and whatever other low-code/no-code solution I could find, I felt unfulfilled and knew something lay waiting for me if I finally would stop procrastinating learning web dev and just go all in.
It’s a year and one day later — I’m not sure if what I just experienced was the worst year or the best year of my life — every life issue imaginable as come up and extreme stress around money nearly ruined my relationship with my fiance — because I still am not sure what this road looks like for me and every hard lesson from the last year has molded me into a compassionate, yet tough-minded, creative problem-solving individual who loves programming so much more than just the salary I initially set out for.
This year was brutal because of a lot of things that were supposed to happen didn’t happen; I got ripped off by multiple clients and also gave away way too much of my free time — I’m just now learning to ask for what I’m worth. But after coming to tough terms with the last 366 days and what has transpired, I know that I really am just touching the ice berg on what I can do with my career and finally have a lot of people asking for quotes and to apply for jobs.
Do I take the gig I’ve worked so hard for or do I stay true to my entrepreneurial spirit and play out a tough road ahead in a tough economy? The fact I can sit and have this choice vs. sitting where I was a year ago — fired, hopeless, and trying to figure out how to set up an Express server while learning Python, Angular, and JavaScript at the same time — is a sign of growth and something big around the corner for me.
I don’t have another week of that suffering in me however, so I choose to be thankful while sitting here reflecting on this crazy, shitty year. I…
