After nearly three years I was let go and lost my job due to the COVID-19 pandemic, yeah, it sucks…hard. I’m now unemployed but thankfully I have a tremendous and supportive wife, family and friends. I really have no idea where I would be without them.

The breakup

I found out at the same time as many of my colleagues, Slack exploded and Notification Center on my Mac was trying to keep up. It was terrible. There were enough tears coming out of my face to fill a bucket. I was in absolute disbelief because I’ve never been let go from a job before, I guess there’s a first for everything 🤷‍♂️.

Hope

Soon after I realized that this isn’t a damning thing and that this might actually be good. The thing was, I wasn’t that happy with my current role. Sure, I was told things will change and I’ll get to start working on the projects that I’ve been asking to work on for a long time but in this new world things change very rapidly, clearly. What I really wanted to do was program, write code, and create things. I’ve been doing this in my spare time for awhile now but I haven’t been able to make that leap in my career.

After it was all said and done the clouds actually parted(which is rare in Washington, it’s been raining for weeks now) and I realized something, this wasn’t a death sentence. As a matter of fact, this could be a positive thing - a real positive thing. I took a long walk, in hopes that the clouds wouldn’t roll in, and gained some perspective. It’s funny how after the dust settled of no longer having a steady income how the light changes on everything. Walking down the street I was actually smiling which felt nice after what seemed like hours of sadness and crying. I was talking with my wife, Maggie, and we both feel the same way, we don’t feel shackled down to living in Tacoma or even Washington. We can literally pick up and go where we want, assuming we can financially, of course. I can now focus on programming and honing those skills to hopefully pick up a new job. I can finally release that iOS app that I’ve been putting off finishing, hell I might even try and find a way to contribute to Swift, the language that I really cut my teeth on and really enjoy. Maybe I’ll pack up my car and drive down and see my wife who has been working in a different state for the last little bit.

I’ll say one thing though, I don’t want to sit back and be complacent. I’ve thought about what would happen to me if I ever lost a job, I was afraid of being that guy to sit on the couch watching TV while the hours slowly tick away. I’m afraid of becoming that person but, as of right now I have zero intention on becoming that person. I want to be programming, I want to be building and learning new things and dammit I’m going to do that.

There is hope at the end of all of this, I just hope that you can too. It’s not easy, it’s never going to be easy but we can at least try to not look down the barrel of the gun at every waking moment.

Understanding and acknowledgement

Everything I wrote today is about my personal experience, thus far. That being said I totally understand that there’s many others out there in much harder financial and social situations and I want to make sure I acknowledge that. If you’re like me and in the tech world, give your peers a quick shoutout on social media, share a cool project to help boost those skills.