starting over, sort of
What happens when you realize the life you built isn't the one you want.
Two years ago I ended up in the ICU. Not from anything dramatic—just my body deciding it had had enough of whatever I was doing to it.
I remember lying there, fully awake, machine breathing for me, thinking: “If I’d died, what would I have been doing with my life?”
The answer was depressing. I had a comfortable job I could phone in. Money. Friends. All the boxes checked. But I felt like I was watching my own life from the outside.
the problem with easy
Nothing was wrong, exactly. That was the problem.
I’d optimized for comfort. Low effort, low stakes, low everything. Ship the deck, hit the number, get the Slack reaction. Repeat until retirement or death, whichever came first.
College me would’ve been disgusted. That guy stayed up all night building things nobody asked for. Took on projects just to see if he could. Actually cared about stuff.
Now I was “delivering cross-functional value.” I’d become a walking SMART goal.
the fake solution
So I did what people do when they panic: I tried to change everything at once.
Told everyone I was moving to New York. Told my partner I needed space. Started cleaning my apartment obsessively (not in a Jordan Peterson way—screw that guy).
It didn’t help. Changing your location doesn’t fix anything when the actual problem is you.
what actually changed
Eventually I stopped running and just sat with it.
I thought about my senior design project at SCU. We built something in a garage with our own money and no institutional backing. We didn’t care about résumés or LinkedIn. We just wanted to see if we could make something real.
That’s what I’d lost. Not ambition—I had plenty of that. But the willingness to do something hard and uncertain just because it mattered to me.
what I’m doing now
I joined Gitpod as a PMM. It’s early and messy and there’s no playbook. That’s the point.
I’m also biking every bike lane in San Francisco. No real reason except it sounds hard and interesting and I think this city could be so much better for cyclists than it is.
And I’m moving in with my partner—the one I almost left during my fake New York phase. Turns out commitment is scarier than chaos. And better.
This isn’t a rebrand or a fresh start. It’s just me trying to do things that feel real again.
We’ll see how it goes.