Thank Fuck '23 is Nearly Over

Safe to say 2023 won’t go down as a classic. Redundancy, a bruising job market, and some unwelcome mental health passengers made sure of that. But it ended better than it started, which is more than could be said a few months in.

January started with so much promise

It didn’t, really.

Work was tough from the off. Everyone was dealing with the fallout of a disastrous re-org the previous year, and the cracks were showing. On a personal level, it gave me space to start asking some questions I’d been avoiding: what do I actually want to be doing, and how do I get the spark back? I wrote a lot of notes. More on those later.

Then, in the kind of timing only the universe can manage, a routine couch-to-5k session ended with a torn meniscus and a stress fracture of the tibia. Private healthcare through work meant I could get it sorted relatively quickly, which, as the year unfolded, turned out to matter more than I knew at the time.

Easter bombshell

The redundancy news dropped the day before Easter. How’s that for a send-off? Enjoy the long weekend. My contract was terminated over the summer.

Losing the job itself wasn’t the worst of it: companies overextend and correct, I’ve seen it before. What stuck was the manner of it. Scripted, emotionless, delivered right before a bank holiday weekend. A masterclass in how not to treat people.

The job hunt that followed was grim. I’ve written about it in more detail in post-redundancy thoughts: the recruiter ghosting, the live coding sessions, the boilerplate rejections, the market that seemed to have quietly decided that front-end expertise wasn’t what it was looking for. If you’re curious, it’s all there.

In August I landed a position as Tech Principal at AND Digital. The pressure lifted. I was back.

The unwelcome return

And then, just as things stabilised, the mental health stuff came back hard.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m neurodivergent and carry anxiety, depression, and an eating disorder. I mention it openly, not for sympathy, but because pretending it doesn’t exist helps no one. Most of the time it’s managed, one way or another. This year it wasn’t, for a while.

I’d come off fluoxetine too quickly the previous year. In hindsight, obviously. At the time it felt like progress. I’m back on it now, and less in a rush to treat stability as something to be fixed.

Plans for 2024

Those notes from January (the ones I wrote when work was bad and I was trying to figure out what I actually wanted) turned out to be useful. They pointed towards some things I already knew but hadn’t been honest with myself about: I want to do proper front-end work, the good kind, HTML and CSS and accessibility and design systems. I want to mentor people. I want to write more, speak more, and work with people who give a damn.

The design technologist direction (sitting properly between design and engineering rather than apologising for being at the boundary) felt right then and still does.

As it turned out: most of it happened. The Royal London move in 2024 put me in a role that matched almost everything on that list. The writing is still a work in progress. Some things take longer.

2023 was a year I won’t be rushing to revisit. But the clarity it produced (about what I want, what I won’t put up with, and what actually matters) was worth something.

Onwards to '24.