I’m not sure where to begin to explain my absence, my return, or the state of things. I could go on at great length on any of the above, but maybe that’s not the best use of bandwidth. I do feel as though I owe you a teeny bit of explanation. So let me try to tackle each topic in 150 words or less.
My Absence:
The last year has been hell at work. I’m on my 4th manager in 12 months. My beloved director left, I almost left, I had my resignation letter written. It was a year of thirty-hour releases, low morale, rampant inter-department tribalism, bitter communications, countless escalations, major incidents, blame, vitriol, drama. My paying job was so demanding that it was spilling over into my other job: raising the Cherub. This imbalance being unacceptable, I first deleted all other demands on my time, including blogging. Then, after consulting a number of my most trusted Jedi, I asked to change my role.
My Return:
One of the aforementioned trusted Jedi I consulted, the one I’ve known the longest, fired me up to change things. I was scared of no longer being a Technical Goddess, and of allowing my other skills to surface. But with his advice and support, I started making changes, having discussions at work about moving on, and things started to fall into place.
Then he got sick in May. It was a suckerpunch out of nowhere. In August he was gone. I lost one of my dearest, sweetest, funniest friends, and in the process I lost my own path and momentum for awhile.
I’m back partly because of him. He was a writer and he was always telling me to write. I can still hear his voice. It was time for me to write again.
The State of Things:
I’m still mourning and processing the loss of my friend. I am still detoxing from the last year at work. But I started my new role two weeks ago and I love it.
It’s questionable whether or not I am still a Technical Goddess, as I have left operations and moved into service level management. I’m having some phantom limb syndrome, I sometimes wake in the night and check my phone to see if I have missed any alerts. I’m not building servers, configuring applications, or managing migrations, and that’s odd because I’ve been doing it for the last 10 years. It will take time to let go.
My focus at the moment is cataloguing everything: Services, systems, apps, contracts, owners. I’m becoming a Visio Goddess. I feel as though I’m a layer removed from ops but still part of the team. We’ll see how this plays out.
That’s where things have been, and now where they are going. I’m sure I’ll go into all of the above in more detail as I find my voice again. My friend always said that the first page is the hardest but then things start to flow. Here’s my first real post in over a year, written in celebration of surviving the challenges of the last year and in loving memory of a friend who helped put my life back into perspective, with every hope that the words will continue to flow.
