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After nearly 50 weeks, it’s time for me to close my career break and re-enter the familiar highs and lows of full-time work.

I went into the break imagining long, uninterrupted silence. I expected the solitude. I didn’t expect to miss talking to people as much as I did. For someone who sits slightly on the introverted side of things, it was a surprise to realise how much my mind depends on conversation—on that small spark that jumps between people when the right question is asked. It was also one of the reasons I felt ready to return. I’m in the prime years of my working life, and I want to spend them immersed in collaboration rather than orbiting it from a distance.

During the break, I found myself rethinking the work of a technical writer in a year filled with noise, speculation, and small pockets of clarity. I now think of technical writing as something shaped by humans and machines, each with their own strengths. I had a chance to talk through those early thoughts and write a little about them.

This was also a year of watching the fear and confusion around technical writing and AI. My view remains simple: AI is a tool. Useful when used well, unhelpful when not. I saved time with it, then spent twice as much trying to make it understand what I wanted. Strangely, I was more patient with the machine than with humans. I’m still thinking about what that says. It was a reminder that tools change—but the craft, and the expectations around it, still need human judgment.

Somewhere in all this, I finally learned to relax without guilt—a life skill I wish someone had taught me much earlier. I made space to feel the sting of rejected applications without letting it define me. That discomfort became a quiet tutor, nudging me to reassess what a technical writer really does and what kind of writer I want to be.

I let myself chase ideas without a roadmap. I vibe-coded whenever something caught my attention or when a small itch needed scratching. I built a Readest-to-Readwise highlights importer, a LinkedIn carousel builder that uses Markdown, and a Google Sheets–to–JSON converter to clean up my book library.

I read a lot of books in my yearly pursuit of a hundred, and an unreasonable number of web novels—mostly in the litrpg and xianxia genres. I binge-watched K-dramas and anime, and at 1.7× speed, discovered that Japanese sounds strangely soothing and mellifluous to my ear in a way Korean doesn’t. A highly specific discovery, but a delightful one.

And on some mornings, I took post-breakfast naps, the kind of indulgence that only makes sense when you have nowhere urgent to be. Somehow, the post-lunch siesta never caught on.

All of this taught me to let life unfold without forcing it. It reminded me that being a small fish in a big pond is often the healthiest, happiest place to grow. It quieted that background hum of “What next?” that had shadowed me for months.

Now, as I return to work, I’m stepping in with clearer intent, grounded expectations, and a renewed respect for the simple act of showing up, connecting, and doing the work with others.

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Last night as we finished our pre-bed ritual of Wordle, Max said, 'Appa, did you know that you would be called a Xenial? You belong to a generation that grew up without the internet but became its first users. And then there is another group between Millennials and Gen Z called Zillenials.'

"No, I didn't know that," I replied.

As he decided to read a chapter or two on his Kindle before he fell asleep, I made my way to the bed and looked it up. He was right! I can be termed a Xennial (with a double n).

That led me down a path of reminiscence.

The best moments of my childhood coincided with the twilight of a world before the internet; I remember clearly that such a time existed, and it had its own unique benefits.

I thought... Of friends who drifted away from me and ones I drifted away from. Of faded memories of playing football and cricket on streets, dried lakebeds, and unoccupied plots of land. Of places, now changed beyond recognition, once familiar, now strange. The past is indeed a foreign land and its customs bizarre1.

Later, after I've tucked Max in and the house has settled into quiet, I return to Joseph Jebelli's The Brain at Rest. Reading about boredom as a neurological necessity, about how the unstimulated brain actually works harder, creates new connections, solves problems we didn't know we had—I think about those long afternoons of my childhood. The ones that felt endless, oppressive even. Hours spent staring at ceilings, wandering empty lots, waiting for something, anything, to happen. What seemed like emptiness was actually my brain at work. I wonder what Max's brain does in those moments between stimulation, if such moments even exist for him anymore. He hates being bored.

🎶 Background music whilst writing: Music to write Faster & Better (YouTube)

  1. The opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between ↩

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Today would have been her seventy-third birthday. Twelve years now since cancer claimed her—twelve years of birthdays marked by absence rather than presence.

I sit outside the church, the priest’s sermon about vigilance carrying through the open doors—about being ready for the master who may come at any time—and I find myself wondering about the mathematics of grief. How we measure loss not just in what was taken, but in what was never given the chance to be.

She never held any of her grandchildren—never saw their first steps or heard their laughter echo through rooms she would never enter. I sometimes think about how she would have delighted in each of them, told them stories about when we were young, spoiled them with that particular tenderness grandmothers possess. It’s all enshrined in a life that never unfolded, a life I wander through only in my mind.

The distance grows in both directions: we drift from those we’ve lost just as surely as they fade from us.

In those first raw years, I dreamed of her often, as she was before the illness took hold—moving through familiar spaces, speaking in that voice I was desperate not to forget. But the dreams come less frequently now. The details erode: I have to work harder to recall the way she laughed, or the precise inflection she used when saying my name in exasperation.

Maybe this is the cruelest mathematics of time—how it heals by slowly erasing, how it grants us the grace of moving forward by making the past ever more muted. We don’t mean to let them fade. We simply cannot bear the full weight of their absence with the same intensity forever and still manage to live.

I wonder what she would think of who I’ve become. Would she recognize the adult I am now, shaped by a dozen years of decisions she never witnessed? Would she approve of the choices I’ve made?

Sometimes I wish I could slip sideways into that other life—the one where early detection meant everything, where treatments worked, where seventy-three candles illuminate a room filled with her voice and laughter. Where grandchildren climb into her lap.

But wishes are just another form of mathematics, and the numbers never add up the way we want them to.

Instead, I stay here with these memories, the sermon’s words carrying out to where I sit. I think again about the mathematics of grief—how the equation is never solved, only reckoned with over and over.

Love doesn’t require presence to endure. Only the willingness to keep adding to it, year after impossible year.

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On this day in 2002, I walked into my very first job at Angler as a Content Developer.

It was the beginning of a journey I couldn’t have fully imagined then, one shaped by learning, change, resilience, and growth. Over these 23 years, I've had the privilege of working across different roles and domains, each one adding its own layer of meaning and experience.

One thing that hasn’t changed is my curiosity. The same inquisitiveness that lit up my first day still drives me forward — to ask better questions, seek deeper understanding, and stay open to the unknown.

I've made my share of mistakes too, and I’m grateful for every single one of them. They’ve taught me humility, perspective, and the value of continuous reflection.

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The Sirens imploring Ulysses to stay

So I turned 45. What does this mean? Am I considered middle-aged?

The advantage of owning your domain is that it is an eternal sandbox that you can always play with. You can build it up or raze it down to rebuild again (and again).

As I start off my 45 th year, I am looking at this refresh as a new chapter still trying to make sense of blogging again.

I've stopped posting on social media for a few years now. Most of my accounts are gathering dust and a shadow of what it was in their heydays. Social media was interesting when it was still in its nascent stage. My dissatisfaction with what social media promised at the start and what it has become now is another reason why I'm trying to start writing again on my own site.

But then again, I'm considering it a new start for the my #year45.

Let's see where this odyssey leads. And I hope I can resist the siren call of social media and use this more.