I Forgot I Was an Engineer

It's been almost ten years since I last stepped into a corporate office as an employee.

I didn't exactly leave with some grand plan to reinvent myself. The company no longer needed me, and by that point, the office had started feeling more like a battlefield than a place where I could put what I knew to good use and get paid for it. So I left. Life moved on, I started working from home, and somehow almost a decade passed.

Then a few days ago, I was dropping the kids off at school.

There were other parents doing the same thing, except some of them were clearly on their way to work. They were dressed for the office, dropping off their children before rushing back out to wherever they needed to be. Meanwhile, there I was in my pajamas, dropping off mine, flying kisses, and probably looking very much like someone whose biggest professional obligation that morning was going back home.

And for some reason, looking at them made me remember something I don't really think about anymore.

I'm an engineer.

A computer engineer, actually.

Which sounds ridiculous to say as though I've just discovered a forgotten detail about myself, but I think that's exactly what happened. Somewhere between becoming a wife, becoming a mother, leaving corporate life, working from home, writing for clients, managing other people's content, and everything else life piled on afterward, I stopped thinking of myself that way.

Even before I became a manager at my previous company, before the titles and the corporate years, before I became a wife or a mother, I earned that degree.

I just never really practiced it in the way I once imagined I would.

Right after graduation, my career took me somewhere else. Then somewhere else again. Eventually, writing became the thing I did for a living, and engineering became one of those facts about myself that existed mostly on paper and in stories about college.

Every now and then, though, it apparently tries to remind me that it's still in there.

Like when my daughter and I argue over her computer activities.

She'll show me what they're supposed to code, and I'll tell her how I remember doing it based on lessons stored somewhere in my brain circa 2003. Then she'll tell me that's not how they were taught to do it. So there we are, two generations arguing over code, with her using what she learned in class and me digging through twenty-something-year-old information in my head like I'm trying to recover files from an ancient hard drive.

And yes, sometimes the eighth-grader is right. Please don't tell her I put that in writing.

I've been writing on WordPress for years, both for work and for myself, without really thinking much about what was happening underneath it. WordPress did the technical part. I wrote. I uploaded. I formatted things. I published. That was enough.

Then my cousin messaged me and showed me a website he had coded just for fun. And I thought, Wait. I can do that.

Or at least, I used to be able to do something vaguely resembling that.

So I bought a domain for a year through Cloudflare, met GitHub repositories properly for what felt like the first time, and said a temporary goodbye to the comfort of WordPress. Somehow, that one little I wonder if I can still do this has turned into 17 straight days of coding, breaking things, fixing them, breaking something else while fixing the first thing, Googling, learning, relearning, and slowly transferring years' worth of thoughts from my old free WordPress site into this little corner of the internet.

This site. The one you're reading right now.

My friend Kaye had been telling me for a long time that I should do something like this. I always said I didn't have the time.

Maybe I did. Maybe time wasn't really the problem. Maybe I had just forgotten that I could.

I think when you haven't used a part of yourself for a very long time, it becomes easy to assume you've lost it. And the longer you leave it alone, the more intimidating it becomes to go back. Technology certainly didn't wait around for me. The things I learned more than two decades ago aren't necessarily the way things are done now, and there have been plenty of moments over the past 17 days when I've stared at my screen wondering what on earth I've gotten myself into.

But there's also something strangely familiar about it.

The logic. The problem-solving. That annoying little determination that kicks in when something doesn't work and suddenly you refuse to go to bed until you figure out why. The satisfaction when a change finally goes green, the page loads, and the thing you were trying to make happen actually happens.

Apparently, that part of my brain wasn't gone. It was just... very, very dusty.

And perhaps that's one of the stranger things about getting older. We spend so much time becoming new versions of ourselves that sometimes we forget we don't necessarily have to abandon all the old ones.

I am a wife. I'm a mother. I'm a writer. I've been a manager, a ghostwriter, a content creator, and apparently someone who attends school drop-off in pajamas without shame.

But I'm also still the girl who graduated with a Computer Engineering degree.

Maybe she didn't get the career she thought she'd have when she graduated. Maybe she took a twenty-something-year detour before deciding to see what she could still remember. And maybe her current computer instructor happens to be her 12-year-old daughter and a Grade 8 textbook.

Life is weird like that.

I don't know where this goes from here. I'm not about to declare that I'm returning to engineering or changing careers at 44. Right now, I'm just enjoying finding this part of myself again and seeing what I can still do with it.

Maybe that's enough.

Because I used to think I didn't have time to build something like this. Now I'm starting to wonder how many other things I've told myself I don't have time for when what I really meant was that I was afraid I'd forgotten how.

Turns out, forgetting how to do something isn't the same as no longer being capable of learning it again.

So here I am, 44 years old, 17 days into coding my own website, occasionally consulting an eighth-grader's computer book when necessary.

It's not too late. So we'll see how this goes.

And if the site suddenly disappears one day, let's all agree it was probably GitHub's fault.