I thought about calling this entry “The Seven Year Itch.” Seven years ago, I was just coming off a stint in higher education which lasted- wait for it – seven years. It’s difficult to imagine that I’ve been in DC as long as I was at Birmingham-Southern and Vanderbilt combined. It feels like at least two lifetimes. And yet, as I sit here tonight on the floor of my apartment, with absolutely no furniture and only a TV and cable box to go with my computer, I can’t help feeling that it hasn’t been that long since September 1997, when I lived my first month in Washington with nothing at home but clothes, a boom box, a TV, an air mattress, and a computer set up on an empty pizza box on the floor.
It’s an awful long way from a terrified kid, just months removed from prematurely ending a 20-year academic career, nursing literally thousands of dollars in credit card debt and whose Mac knowledge was largely limited to “trash the prefs and rebuild the desktop.” I barely had a pot to piss in, I barely knew anyone here, and I signed a six-month lease to start with so I wouldn’t have to pay to break the contract if it didn’t work out.
I had a plan, too, though I didn’t realize it at the time. It was based on my dad’s credo of “do the best you can and don’t be a horses ass.” It was based on an offhand remark from a teammate at the bar my first year of grad school, and it was appropriate for someone whose life had just fallen out from under him. My plan was to reach the point where I could prove that I didn’t have to prove anything.
I think I did all right. Nobody’s ever going to mistake me for Warren Buffett, but I’m paying the bills as they come in and in the same month at that. I did my last help call today, for the #2 or 3 guy in the company, with an intuitive fix for something that another so-called “tech” person outside our group had botched. And I have my crew, my friends, the kind of people you wait your whole life to be able to claim as your own.
And yet.
A few years ago, I read a book by Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift. It was written at the height of the tech boom, after I’d had a couple years in the business, and it dealt with everything from the tortuous route of an IPO to the pressure of developing web apps for major media companies to the concept of the hockey-stick sales pattern. But the part that was excerpted for Wired magazine was the story of half a dozen people who had picked up their lives and gone to Silicon Valley to find their fortune.
I had two thoughts after reading it, largely at once: “These people are out of their hyperventilating minds” and “What if…do I have what it takes?” To pull up stakes, pack the bags, and chase the big dream…and as the years rolled by, I realized that if I’m going to do it, it has to be soon. I’m so incredibly burned out in my current situation, the tech sector is starting to rebound…if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen now.
Seven years ago, I wouldn’t have tried it. I would have clung to what was safe and known until it forcibly dislodged me, no matter how miserable I was. The way I did in high school. And college. And grad school. I don’t *have* to leave…but I’m ready, and I want to, and I can. I can do this. I can take the plunge. I can make it happen.
I don’t know whether it comes from being Southern or Celtic or what, but I’ve spent an awful lot of my life being fixated on the past. Of wishing things could have been different, trying to figure out what I did wrong, as if by hoping hard enough and finding the solution, I could change what had happened in my life. But that’s not possible. I’m never going to quarterback Alabama to a title. I’m not going to drink and snog and hack my way through college. I’m not going to pick up a doctorate in political science. My high school dream girl isn’t walking through that door. The one that got away isn’t walking through that door. My father is not walking through that door.
There comes a time in your life – and if you haven’t felt it yet, trust me, you will – when you have to make the decision to stop trying to be the person you were, and let yourself become the person you are.
I’m going west, and I’m going to reach. Because if you don’t reach, you don’t get. And even though it’s going to hurt like hell to leave my team behind, even though it’s going to be terrifying to start over in a strange place with no job and no certainty, despite everything – I’ve never in my life been more convinced I’m doing the right thing.
Let’s go chase the big dream.
– 30 June 2004
Twenty years on, there is no questioning it was the right move. It worked. I found myself working for Apple by August 9, later hired on staff and promoted. We managed to buy a house, which more than doubled in value by the time we sold it sixteen years later. I eventually got my VW, albeit as a Rabbit rather than a New Beetle. I had TiVo and DirecTV, I had friends, and by the end of 2006 there was no disputing it was a triumph.
Part of the story, though, is that there’s no “happily ever after” where time and history stop. The years roll on. Other people move along with their lives. The biggest story for me in the last decade is just how many people moved away – some no further than Burlingame or Santa Cruz, but many more to Texas or Seattle or even abroad, and that had a meaningful impact on how my life changed after 40. Looking back through the old blog contents of the early days, it feels like my life 2004-06 was a natural extension of my DC days, just with better climate and more money and fewer places to smoke.
I wish I could explain what happened in 2007. I don’t know if it was purely chemical, triggered by homesickness, manifested by a toxic work environment or what, but the wave of chronic depression caused me to make the second biggest mistake of my life: rather than seek accommodation for my knee, I chose instead to find a more technical job elsewhere, afraid that I would wind up half secretary and half dockwalloper and permanently behind the curve on actual IT. Instead, I wound up a subcontractor with no benefits, working in an environment far behind the curve on actual IT, and when I finally crawled my way out of it, I was working at a different place with a 10% pay cut that took three and a half years to catch back up to…and I never got away from that place. And then that place outsourced me and carved up my benefits just as COVID struck…and now?
Now I live in a different house, with a yard and a shed and a hot tub, in a quiet pleasant neighborhood where I can walk to the grocery or the Starbucks or the local burger-brunch-or-beer place. I can easily bike downtown, and we’re close to the better freeway for getting up and down. Transit has ceased to be a viable option, though, which is a shame since Caltrain will finally deliver electric trains in September. I have achieved the dream of 1997: I can work from anywhere with internet access, from my front room to Gulf Shores to Prague, in a job that is not customer facing. The cars are a hybrid Chevy and an electric VW. I have become the person I am instead of the person I was.
I’m happy with my life right this instant. I like being able to start work from my phone before getting out of bed, padding to the kitchen to grind my coffee, walking out to happy hour at 3 on the odd Friday, building bits of community through church or civic service or just attending the downtown markets and festivals. It’s the bits of a cozy life, and that’s all I need for the next twenty years, if I can keep it. But that’s the real trick. There’s another existential election on the way. The high temperature has hit 100 degrees four times since Independence Day. I look in the mirror at the sun damage on one temple or how long a cut on the arm takes to heal or the dark circles under my eyes and see that even if it doesn’t feel like twenty years have passed, my body says otherwise. And there’s nothing that says my employer won’t absently strike a line item on the budget and I find myself having to get another job sitting a help desk somewhere for half what I make now, because over-50 in this place and industry is basically a death sentence on the job search market.
And I wonder about the next twenty years. Will I be retired by then? Will that even be possible? What happens to democracy? What happens to people I care about if things turn ugly and the worst people in America get the controls? Never mind hoping for twenty good years, can I expect twenty years total? I’m sure my father did, at some level. Twenty years ago, all I wanted was one more chance at a fresh start. And now, all I want is one good chance at a graceful finish.
I guess that’s what it means to get old.