After stepping away from full-time work, I spent years navigating uncertainty, rebuilding confidence, and rethinking what I want from my career. Here’s what I learned in the in-between.
In 2016, I joined Amazon as a self-taught developer—an achievement that felt like a breakthrough. I gained trust on my team, shipped meaningful work, and settled into a sense of stability. But by 2019, burnout was creeping in. I made a plan to vest my four-year RSUs and began traveling, rediscovering a sense of joy and possibility outside of work. Then the pandemic hit. I was living alone, and as isolation deepened, my mental health unraveled. Panic, PTSD symptoms, and disconnection became daily obstacles. I took a leave, then resigned—no longer able to function in the role that once felt like a calling.
The years that followed forced me to reckon with things I’d never had to face before: how to build a life without structure, how to navigate long-term instability, how to recover—slowly—from collapse. I worked local jobs, explored mental health support systems, and eventually found grounding in mindfulness-based recovery. I also found clarity. These past few years taught me lessons I was never going to learn inside the velocity of a sprint or a roadmap. They emerged from stillness, from breakdown, from trial and error. Some were hard-won. Some are still unfolding. But together, they reshaped how I think about work, identity, and what it means to start over with intention.
1. Nothing Is Guaranteed
I used to think that strong performance and positive feedback were a kind of insurance policy—that as long as I kept delivering, I’d be safe. But 2020 shattered that illusion. A global pandemic turned a job I excelled at into one I could no longer do, and the support structures I relied on—both personal and professional—vanished overnight. I’ve had to come to terms with how fragile our systems can be, and how dangerous it is to build a life on the promise of stability alone.
2. The Value of My Time
When you’re employed, it’s easy to forget how precious your time is—you give it away in exchange for a regular paycheck, whether you’re thriving or just treading water. But unemployment rewrites that equation. There’s no ambiguity: you either make progress or you don’t. Every hour becomes a conscious investment in recovery, learning, job search strategy, or just staying grounded. I became far more intentional about how I spend my time—and fiercely protective of it.
3. Environment Matters (More Than I Thought)
It turns out I’m not someone who thrives in isolation. Being around others, even passively, helps me stay motivated and productive. I spent way too long trying to force myself to succeed in environments that just didn’t work for me—home offices, long stretches of remote silence, the slow drift into inertia. Now I know better: I do my best thinking and creating when I show up somewhere, put myself in motion, and feel life happening around me.
4. Burnout Isn’t a Personal Failing
I didn’t burn out because I was weak. I burned out because I stayed in an environment that had stopped working for me and tried to muscle through it alone. When work became unsustainable, I didn’t immediately leave—I just internalized the struggle and wore myself down. I’ve since learned that the ability to walk away, to reset, to take a break and not apologize for it—that’s resilience. And it’s how I came back stronger.
5. Rest Is Not a Void
One of the hardest things I’ve learned is that rest isn’t passive. It’s not the absence of activity—it’s a different kind of work: integrating, recalibrating, healing. During my time away, I wasn’t doing nothing. I was learning how to be a person again—outside of productivity metrics. That kind of rest is uncomfortable and unglamorous, but it changed me. I came back to engineering because I wanted to—not because I felt I had to.
6. Start Again, But Smarter
Coming back to tech after a break is intimidating. The industry moves fast, and imposter syndrome is real. But I didn’t rush. I started small—building tools I cared about, learning Swift, contributing meaningfully to personal projects. Each step rebuilt confidence on my own terms. I wasn’t just brushing up on skills—I was proving to myself that I still love this work, and that I could approach it with more clarity and care than before.
7. What I Actually Want from Work
After stepping away from the noise, I was able to get clear on what I value: smart collaborators, meaningful problems, thoughtful systems, and a human pace. I’m no longer chasing titles or optimizing for prestige. I’m looking for work that feels sustainable—where I can build things that matter and be part of a team that supports each other through uncertainty, not just success.
8. Try Something Totally Different (Even If It’s Temporary)
Sometimes the best way forward isn’t to fix what’s broken—it’s to step into something entirely unfamiliar. For me, that meant trying jobs I never imagined I’d do—grocery work, lumber sales, hands-on roles that taught me about pacing, boundaries, and the environments I actually function well in. It also meant exploring mindfulness and Buddhist practice. Sitting in silence, doing nothing—on purpose—felt deeply counterintuitive at first. But that stillness gave me tools I couldn’t get any other way: how to recognize what I can and can’t control, how to meet pain without amplifying it into suffering, how to treat myself with compassion instead of critique.
Trying something different also meant reevaluating things I’d taken for granted—like whether I needed to be medicated to function. Going off ADHD medication (with careful observation and out of necessity) ended up helping me stabilize. I found a rhythm that worked better for me, and one I could maintain without being at the mercy of a fragmented prescription system. None of these shifts were permanent solutions on their own—but together, they helped me define what kind of life I want to build, and what kind of work I’m now ready to return to.
9. The Difficulty—and Dignity—of Being In-Between
There’s a strange kind of exile that comes with long-term unemployment. You fall out of rhythm with the working world—no standups, no deadlines, no team Slack banter or Friday demos. The structure that used to frame your days disappears, and with it, sometimes, your sense of identity. It’s disorienting, and often lonely.
And yet, there’s dignity in that space too—if you can stand to stay in it. I learned how to hold uncertainty without rushing to escape it. I learned how to sit with the question of who I am when I’m not being productive. I watched the people around me define themselves by their busyness, their titles, their LinkedIn updates—and I had to decide if I believed in my worth outside of all that.
Being in-between is not just a waiting room. It’s a crucible. It taught me patience, humility, and a kind of internal steadiness I didn’t know I was capable of. And while I wouldn’t choose that liminal space again, I’m proud of how I lived in it. It changed how I carry myself now that I’m back in motion.
If you’re reading this while in your own in-between—whether it’s by choice, by force, or by sheer circumstance—just know you’re not alone. This season might not look like progress from the outside, but that doesn’t mean it’s wasted. You’re still becoming. And when the time comes to return, you’ll carry more than you left with.