Could My Future Be On Medium?

Career changes, and a loss of identity

Photo taken by the author.

Nine years ago, I gave up my full-time job to look after my wife and children.

Before that, I’d worked for twenty-six years, doing electronic design and software development. (Mostly embedded systems for packaging machinery and printers.)

When meeting new people, they often like to ask:

“What do you do?”

For most of my life, the answer was always simple — I would say that I’m an electronics engineer. Or a software developer.

But during the eight years since my wife died, I feel like I can’t say that anymore.

I’ve lost my identity.

Sometimes, I’ve embraced being a stay-at-home dad. At other times, I’ve referred to myself in terms of whatever I was working on in my spare time.

Failed Projects

Since 2012, I’ve worked on a number of different projects at home. But none of them were successful. Perhaps undiagnosed ADHD was a factor.

Here are the main projects:

I wrote some songs, and published them online.

I put my music on ReverbNation, SoundCloud, and popular services such as Spotify and Apple Music.

Eventually, I decided that I didn’t like my artist name. And I started to think that my songs were not good enough. So I removed them.

(Since then, after listening to them again, and deciding they’re not too bad after all, I’ve put them back online in a couple of places.)

I nearly finished a couple of apps for the Mac, and iOS.

I kept making my apps more complex, so I never quite finished them. And I also changed the technology that was used behind the scenes, e.g. I switched to SwiftUI before it was mature enough to be usable, causing further delays.

I created a few websites and blogs, relating to old computers, technology and music.

In each case, I was super-enthusiastic for several months, before becoming disillusioned when I didn’t manage to get many views. In the end, I closed them all.

I tried to revive sales in some software that I wrote in 2005.

Years ago, I wrote some barcode software in my spare time, which ran on Windows. I managed to sell quite a number of copies, and people gave me good feedback. However, sales declined, and I just let it gather dust.

A couple of years ago, I got a few unexpected sales for no apparent reason. So I spent some time redesigning the website, and doing a minor update to the software. However, there were no more sales.

Perhaps the availability of free alternatives was one problem. And perhaps the lack of a code-signing certificate was another.

In the end, I made the decision to close down my software website. It was quite a tough decision, because it had been part of my life for around 15 years.

I Could Not Continue

A few weeks ago, I sat down at my laptop, determined to resume work on an unfinished iOS app.

To me, development work has always been like a series of hurdles. As soon as you get over one, another one appears. Even in the recent past, I’ve simply kept going, and felt good every time I overcame another challenge.

But this time, I just felt like I’d had enough. Perhaps it was because I didn’t believe in what I was doing, or that it would amount to anything worthwhile.

Or — is it possible — I might no longer want to do that kind of work?

Perhaps I was simply clinging on to the title of app developer.

Writing

When I think about it, all the things that I’ve done have had one thing in common: writing.

I liked writing help files for my software.

And I enjoyed writing articles for my websites, despite the lack of readers.

At work, I used to like writing technical reports and procedures. I especially liked to make things clear, and easy to understand.

I also used to write long posts in some of the widowed groups, which seemed to be quite well-received.

So I spent a few days working on my Medium articles, and also trying to get past the magic threshold of 100 followers.

And I enjoyed it so much that the hours flew by.

It made me wonder: Could writing be my next chapter?

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Thank You

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The author first published this article on Medium. It was added here on 3 January 2022.