New Game Plus
A new year, a new life, a new blog.
Becoming a parent is such a radical change in life. One I couldn't possibly anticipate. Your old self dies, in a way, and you are reborn as a different person. One with different priorities and views of life, with different occupations, even a different body. I use to tell people that to me, becoming a mother feels like a new game plus: your game ends, and you get to relive it (from a passenger seat) from the very beginning, but keeping all your accumulated experience and items.
When you work with technology, the change is particularly disruptive. All of a sudden, you go from spending most of your time typing on a pc to nursing a baby non-stop. You go from reading tutorials and documentation to studying parenting books, in the hopes to try and figure out this unintuitive little creature. From attending tech talks, to doctor checkups, from hanging with other geeks, to joining normie mom groups.
At first, I thought this change would be temporary. Just while the baby is small. Maybe a few months. Turns out, babies take some more time to become less dependent than what is usually advertised. And even when they do grow, older kids still need your care and attention. But that's ok: early childhood is a period to be cherished, and there'll always be time to go back to my old life - I thought to myself.
Except, that's not that easy when your old life was all about technology. The field moves incredibly fast, particularly web development. You blink an eye, and there's not just a handful of new JS frameworks or cloud shenanigans, but there's also a magical genie that writes all the code for us. The more time you spend out of the loop, the more detached you become, and that makes it harder still to come back. A cursed cycle.
It's been several years now, more than I would like to admit. And despite having a ton of experience in the field, I do feel a bit like I'm starting all over from scratch: I have a million new things to learn, and I've lost the familiarity with the technologies I used to work with. And let's not even talk about applying to jobs... Because right now even grown senior devs are shedding manly tears over that. It feels somehow like my career is back to square one.
But I'd like to think it's not. The game indeed has reseted, but I still have with me a wealth of knowledge that took me a lifetime to learn. And this new magical genie, as chaotic as it is, can also become a powerful ally. So it's not really a new game: it's new game plus.
