It's past 3am and I'm writing this because sleep is clearly not happening tonight, no matter how loudly my body insists that it's exhausted. I went out with friends earlier, we had drinks around midnight, I came home telling myself I'd be unconscious within minutes. I got maybe an hour and a half. Then I woke up and just... sat there. Not tired-tired. Not really awake either. Some strange in-between state where my body forgot the instructions for how sleeping is supposed to work. My heart is pounding right now for no reason I can point to. Like it's trying to tell me something and I don't speak the language it's using.
It's a weird week to have a heart that won't calm down.
Three days ago I got laid off. Two and a half years at that company, undone in the time it takes to read an email and sit through. I keep circling the feeling, trying to figure out what shape it actually has. Sad, obviously. But also, underneath the sad, something closer to relief, mixed with dread, mixed with... I don't know. I need to get my feet back under me, that part I know for sure. I just haven't figured out which direction "back under me" is supposed to be yet.
I'm not even sure anymore if I want to stay in this industry. I like it, I really do, or at least I liked it for a long time. But it feels different now. Faster. Emptier, somehow, even though there's more happening in it than ever before. The fun is draining out of it slowly, the way air leaks out of a tire you don't notice until you're already on the side of the road. Everything moves so fast now, models and tools and expectations all shifting under your feet every few months, that I don't know if there's still room in it for the parts I actually enjoyed. Maybe there is. Maybe I'm just tired and it's easier to blame the industry than to admit that.
What I'll miss the most, without a doubt, is the team.
We were ten people, building a flagship product for MLOps out of close to nothing. I worked remotely the entire time and never once felt like I was on the outside looking in, which I think says more about them than it does about me. There was this specific feeling — can't wait to talk to them — that I didn't expect to have about coworkers, and definitely didn't expect to lose this fast, this suddenly. When I joined, I barely understood what was happening around me on the ML side of things. I was blind, honestly. Nodding along in meetings, quietly googling things the second we hung up, hoping nobody noticed. Slowly, slowly, piece by piece, I understood more. They taught me, patiently, without ever making me feel stupid for not knowing, which if you've worked in tech for more than five minutes, you know is rarer than it should be. We solved so many problems together that I've lost count of them, the kind of problems where you're stuck for days, and then somehow, on a call, someone says one sentence and the whole thing clicks open at once. I don't know how I'll replace that feeling. I'm not sure it's replaceable.
Before the flagship product, there was another project — customizing an open source tool to fit one client's very particular, very specific requirements. That one was brutal. No documentation on how the customization was even supposed to work, none, and this was before AI got as capable as it is now, so there was no shortcut, no assistant to ask, just me and the codebase staring at each other for hours. I remember giving up my weekends to work on it, because I didn't want to hand the mess off to someone else, I wanted to be the one who figured it out, even if it cost me. It finished eventually. It always does, somehow, even when you can't see how from the inside of it. And then I moved onto the flagship product, which felt like graduating into the real thing.
On the flagship product I started in UI/UX and frontend integration — API integration, canvas work, node-based interfaces, the kind of work where you can see immediately whether something works or not, which I liked more than I expected to. Then slowly I started touching the backend too, just enough to help the team move faster, close a gap, take one more thing off someone else's plate before it became a bottleneck. I liked being useful in more than one direction. I liked being the person people could hand a weird, undefined problem to and trust that something would come back out the other end.
Everything was good. It really was. But it is what it is, I guess. Things end, teams get restructured, budgets get cut, and none of that cares how much you liked the people you built things with.
I have a backup plan, sort of, the kind of plan you build in your head during commutes and can't-sleep nights like this one. Open a small home restaurant. Keep doing programming on the side, smaller, quieter, on my own terms instead of someone else's roadmap. Maybe. It's not a real plan yet, more of a shape than a plan, something I take out and look at when the actual plan feels too heavy. And the actual plan, right now, is much less romantic: find a job. Update the resume. Message people. Start over, but not from zero, because two and a half years has to count for something, even if right now it just feels like a line item that got deleted from someone's spreadsheet.
It's almost 4am now. My heart has settled a little, finally, though it's still doing that thing every few minutes where it reminds me it exists, just checking in, making sure I'm paying attention. I don't know if tonight is really about the drinks, or the lack of sleep, or the layoff, or all three taking turns with me. Probably all three. I should try to sleep again. I probably won't. But I wanted to write this down before the week turns into a blur and I forget how today actually felt, heart pounding and all.
Tomorrow I'll look for jobs. Tonight I'm just going to lie here in the dark and let my heart do whatever it's doing, and hope it's done saying whatever it's trying to say by the time the sun comes up.