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At the end of the summer of 2021, I quit my job of 6 years.
Like millions of people affected by the pandemic, I was burnt out, tired, and my cup was empty. I was forced to re-evaluate what I wanted out of life, and I developed a deep gratitude for the things I did have. But at the same time, I saw very clearly what wasn’t working and finally had the courage to put myself first and make a change that terrified me.
After my last day, I took a couple months to finish a home reno, go to see family who I haven’t seen in a couple years, and take care of personal things I had put off for so long because I had no energy to tend to them while I was working. I hadn’t seen a doctor in almost 5 years, I looked for a new therapist, got my hair done. Things that seemed so easy to prioritize before the pandemic now seem so much harder to do.
With some distance between myself and my previous job, I started to be able to think about why I had stayed so long and what would my ideal line of work be. I decided I would still enjoy the fast paced tech industry because I crave newness in my life and I enjoy learning and improving every day. But my experience in tech has been in service orgs like Support or HR. These orgs drained my energy because the things I was building wasn’t tangible. Remote work also makes the thing you’re building even more abstract, whereas offices were a physical reminder that your job is outside of yourself. When you’re cooped up at home week after week, that line between yourself and your job is almost non existent. So I decided that a hybrid of some in person and some at home would work for me.
When I think about what excited me the most during my time in tech, I think about hackathons where I joined projects that used UX methodology to create solutions to problems. I liked the structure of having a way to test ideas and I also liked the brainstorming and creativity that it allowed. The energy of working with people on solving a common problem has always been something that I enjoyed and thrived on.
I’ve always been interested in web design ever since I was a teenager and learned HTML to mess around with my blogs. Diaryland, LiveJournal, MySpace, Geocities, I spent countless hours tweaking the look of my page to say something about me. I have fond memories of those days (tbh Medium reminds me a lot of those sites ❤). I think the thing that held me back from pursuing a career in web design was my imposter syndrome. I keep a lot of the art that I make private because I’m so sensitive to criticism. It’s a weak point of mine that I think I’m ready to tackle.
So I created this blog to document my journey into UX design. All of the exciting, terrifying, wonderful, inspiring things will be shared. I’ll force myself to share the failures (as well as the wins) to hopefully keep me accountable and to normalize receiving feedback on the things that I create.
Next up: starting a UX course and my meander into Bullet Journalling to keep myself organized (is that still cool?).
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