Hey there, I’m Nicole, a 30 year old person trying to figure out how to stop defining my worth by the details of my employment. I don’t really feel like writing a novel about myself so maybe a Q&A style will ease me into it. Let’s try that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A lot of reasons which I’m sure will slowly unravel during the course of this post. Mainly, I tend to internalize a lot of my thoughts and I want an outlet for those thoughts without feeling like I have to unload them on my (very patient) husband, friends, and family. During my time at Amazon, I came to like writing quite a lot. If you haven’t heard this about Amazon before, all decisions are centered around documents. They’re very structured, data focused, and have lots of requirements to do them “the right way”. At first I found that frustrating but after awhile, I found that writing in that way really did help me make better decisions. While I don’t intend to be so structured with this blog, I hope to be able to do a similar thing here for my personal life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few weeks ago, I quit my job at AWS after 9 years. The first several years were incredible. I was doing what I always wanted to do, making a ton of money, working with the smartest people I had ever met. But there was always a feeling that I was doing something the wrong way, like no matter what i tweaked or how I grew my skills or the proposals I made, I was never going to be taken seriously. I hear this is a pretty common feeling for women (and other minority groups) in big tech. I spent a lot of time focusing on moving up, playing the “corporate game”, and sacrificing so much time to those ideas. For awhile, I enjoyed it. I knew it was not going to be sustainable for the long term, but I was determined to work as hard as I could until I was ~40 and then I could “do what I really wanted”. In the last year of my time there, a lot went poorly. That’s a whole post in itself so I won’t go into details but I came closer to realizing how ridiculous it sounds to wait until some arbitrary age to explore what I really wanted to do. So, I lasted until 30 instead of 40. At the moment I’m not interested in going back to big tech or maybe even tech at all. I’m taking time to explore other ideas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve been very inspired by my therapist husband starting his own practice so I am exploring starting my own business as well. I’m also spending a lot of my time on myself, which is something I’ve never done in my whole life. I started doing yoga, going to therapy more frequently, volunteering with animals, and being creative. It helps a lot that Seattle has finally entered spring so all I want to do is spend time outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m keeping that pretty open right now because I don’t want to feel like I’m limiting myself. Generally, I’d like to write at least 1 blog post per week on whatever topic I feel like. I would also like to be more open on this outlet about my struggles, getting them out of my head and onto the page. I want to continue to be creative and do things that I’ve been putting off for way too long. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think that’s all for now. Thanks for popping by! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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