It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

What was your biggest achievement of the last year?

Here it is again.

I find I’m often getting tired of writing about my professional pursuits. And after all, sitting here penning out another post telling you all about them and how great it is going with the tech jobs is the so-called “right” answer. I’m supposed to have a shiny perfect resume. I’m supposed to have academic achievements under my belt. I’m supposed to rack up contract wins and be out her bragging about other business-type successes. At least… that’s what I’ve been railroaded to believing my whole damn life. Make lots of money. Have the perfect LinkedIn profile. Nine to five with benefits, right?

Yet, I’m so very much realizing that I’m not that person. Not anymore, at least. Or, maybe it’s that I’ve never been him. It’s almost as tho I’m faking it most of the time, doing a solid enough job being a guy who can get shit done in technology or all the related bits and bobs in which I’ve worked for most of my life. I’m not half bad, and that might just be twenty five years of tallied up hours in that field playing out as raw experience, yet… it’s all a mask.

See I left that world two and a half years ago… even tho the gravitational pull of it almost daily makes it seem like I will never fully escape. I walked away from “The Career” and tried to be something else, and after two and a half years I feel like I’m still explaining that to everyone, even myself.

I panicked in my transition and I took a University program in Business Analysis last spring, finishing it up as the summer arrived. It looks nice on the resume, but until I actually lock a job in it it doesn’t mean much more than that I passed some tests and did well on some assignments. And I never really knew if it is actually what I wanted to do, but it seemed… again… like the “right” thing to do. 

I started a small business, too, and most people in that position would be exclusively occupied with making that work and finding new customers and building and growing and on and on. I do work but it’s more just like a part time job I have, sitting over here on the desk, that makes me feel less disconnected from the world in which I was mired for multiple decades. It felt like the next “right” step in whatever this adventure was, but now it’s just there taunting me.

But then what did I accomplish this year? Actually.

I didn’t sell any art.

I didn’t finish my novel.

I didn’t complete the code for my game.

I could give you a very unsatisfactory answer to all this tho and it goes as such: this year I’ve broken down the problem even further and revealed the raw skin under the lifetime of metaphorical wounds. I am starting to get it. I am starting to actually understand myself and the purpose of where I need to go, what I need to do, and who I need to be: it’s more than the “right” answer of a professional such and such or a guy in this or that job. It’s bigger, at least for me from my perspective it is. It may mean almost nothing to anyone else, but then everyone has their own to worry about don’t they. But I am figuring out mine… which has never been entirely clear even though I’ve always been told what the “right” answer is.  But then the right answer was never a very good answer, and figuring that bit out might just be my biggest achievement of the last year.