Starting Over

For the better part of two years, I went quiet.

Not the healthy kind of quiet; not intentional rest or a deliberate step back to recharge. The other kind. The kind where you stop showing up to the things that used to be yours. The blog went dark. GitHub went still. The communities I had been a part of became places I lurked, if I visited at all. The only code I wrote was the code I was paid to write, and even that started to feel like something I was doing on borrowed energy.

I was hiding. I know that now. At the time I told myself I was just busy, just tired, just going through something. All of that was true. But underneath it was something simpler and harder to say out loud: I did not want to be seen.

This is me deciding to stop.

It’s Not The First Time

I have started over before. After Afghanistan. After being homeless. After the move to Colombia. I know what a restart looks like. I know the particular feeling of standing at the beginning of something with no clear picture of where it ends.

Knowing how to start over does not mean it gets easier. It just means you recognize the terrain. For most of my life I believed the law of diminishing returns did not apply to me. Hold on long enough, grind hard enough, and the light would appear at the end of the tunnel. It always had. At 38, I am finding out that grinding it out costs more than it used to. You have been in this fog before. You know, eventually, that it lifts. But knowing that and feeling it are two very different things. This is a different fog. One that feels all-encompassing.

What Happened

In July 2023, after nearly three years of a tumultuous marriage, I asked for a divorce.

What followed was not a clean break. Tommie, my ex-wife’s dog, who had been such a big part of our lives, got sick shortly after I asked for the divorce. We said goodbye to Tommie in August 2023. Shortly after, my ex-wife was diagnosed with cancer. I made the decision to stay with her through this and we paused the divorce. One of very few positive things in these years is she is cancer free. A few months later I resigned from my job. I was unable to continue working under the weight of it all. I spent the better part of a year unemployed, watching my savings shrink and my confidence follow.

The divorce finalized in March 2026.

That is nearly three years between the decision and the paperwork. Three years of sustained loss, uncertainty, grief layered on top of each other in a way that made it hard to know which thing I was actually grieving on any given day. The answer, most days, was probably all of it.

The Fog

I did not come into this career with some lifelong sense of purpose about building things. That is not my story. What actually happened is that as my marriage deteriorated, work became everything. It was my escape, my hobby, and my career all collapsed into one thing. I poured myself into it because it was easier than looking at what was falling apart everywhere else. There was also nowhere else to go. No close friends nearby, no family, no hobbies that survived the move. The code was something I could control. The code made sense. The rest of my life did not.

When the marriage ended, so did the escape hatch.

Now I am burnt out on the thing I used to hide inside, and the industry itself has shifted in ways that make it hard to know where I stand even if I wanted to re-engage.

I do not know if I want to keep doing this.

I do not know what the next version of my career looks like, or whether it looks like a tech career at all. That question is open ended and I am not sure when it will ever be answered.

The tools that have gotten me through hard things before (the discipline, the drive, the ability to put my head down and grind) are not cutting through this one. I have had to find something else to hold onto.

Max

In the middle of all of it, I adopted a dog, Max.

He knows papa is sad and discouraged more often than not. He is a dog, so the why is probably lost on him. What is not lost on him is that I am his person, and that comes with certain obligations. He has kept me from doing a lot of genuinely dumb things, mostly because I am responsible for a four-legged turd factory who needs feeding and walking regardless of how I feel about myself that day.

I am not going to tell you he saved me, because that is not quite right and it is not the kind of thing I want to put on a dog. What I will tell you is this: there are days when getting out of bed for myself is not a compelling enough reason to get out of bed. On those days, Max is. He gives me a reason to do what is necessary when I do not love or trust myself enough to do it just for me. Right now, that is enough. Sometimes that is all you need.

One reason.

That reason being I really do not want to clean up the living room after the turd factory has finished work.

Why Now

Two years of quiet did not move the fog. The silence did not protect me or buy me any of the things I was hoping it would. It just meant I was alone with it, and the distance between me and the things that are mine (this site, this writing, showing up in any form) kept growing.

At some point you have to stop waiting for the fog to clear on its own. Not because you are ready. Not because you have it figured out. Because waiting until you feel ready is its own kind of hiding, and I have been doing that long enough.

So here we are. A new site, a new direction I cannot fully articulate yet, and an honest admission that I am building this in the middle of the fog rather than after it. This is not a victory lap. It is something closer to a first step: deliberate, a little uncertain, and long overdue.

Wrap Up

I do not know how this chapter ends. I do not know what the site becomes, whether I stay in tech or find my way toward something else entirely, or how long it takes to feel like myself again, or who that version of myself actually is.

What I know is that I am done hiding. Whatever comes next, I would rather meet it in the open.

If you have been here before, thanks for coming back. If you are new, you caught me at the beginning of something. Come along if you want.