Am I falling or am I flying?

If you are interested in my more constructive business writing, check out AI made building cheap, but it made clarity expensive. Otherwise, stay for the existential meander.

In February, I asked whether I should stay or go. In June, I got my answer from the Home Office. This one is about the part I have not written yet: the choices that were still mine, and what I did with them. And the choices I don’t get to make.

Most of my life I have either had time but no money or money but no time. For the first time, I am not working and financially secure, if a bit low on fun money while out of school for the summer.

In this moment, I choose how I spend my days, what I work on, and where I put my energy. 

Sometimes it feels like flying, and at others like falling.

I minored in medieval literature in college, and can’t help but think of the allegory of Fortune’s wheel used by Chaucer, pulling men from high places to sorrow or back again. I’m more philosophical than religious, but no matter how good or bad things are, I think of how that wheel keeps turning.

Is this the peak before a low? Or am I on the way to a higher high than I have ever seen before?

I have some epic low points behind me.

In 2015, I posed the question to my soon-to-be estranged husband, “Should I stop drinking?”

He spun a coaster with his finger, looking down. “No, you just need to moderate.”

We were at our favourite local, the 540 Club, an old bank converted into a dive and dog bar. I had blacked out yet again the night before, and was putting the pieces back together over a Bloody Mary.

“I don’t know if that is how it works. I feel like I am in an enormous house and I am cold, but every room I try to go to is even colder… I think I am the cold.”

Silence. The coaster spun back in the opposite direction, his hands calloused from decades of playing bass.

He said, “I’m not stopping drinking.”

I have thought about that answer for years. He wasn’t being cruel. He was telling me something true, which is that the question I had just worked up the nerve to ask was not, from where he sat, a question at all.

It was a Catch-22: I couldn’t get into recovery while in that relationship, but I might have stayed in that relationship if I could have gotten sober. I have only warm feelings and hopes for my ex and his new life. He just wasn’t the partner I needed in that moment, nor was I who he needed me to be. I own my regrets and see what I would have done differently, but I wasn’t strong enough then.

Alcohol was too much of my friend group’s identity. I didn’t know how to exist in their world without numbing myself. Seven years sober, I have maintained the strongest of those friendships, and some which have fallen away I see now as the drinking buddies that they were.

Age inflation is a challenge for me, as if reconciling with the next milestone earlier means I will feel it less. The moment I turned 48 last year, I began girding myself for 49 later this year, because in 2027 I turn 50.

35 was the first time I had any issues with a birthday. I called it my mid-mid-life crisis, facing down what I had done with the previous 35 years and what I was expected to do with the next 35. Panic overwhelmed me. I had mis-spent too many of my years on earth hungover and wallowing in victimhood. In hindsight, that questioning was when I planted the smallest seed of my future sobriety.

In my late 30s, carrying laundry down three flights of stairs in my San Francisco apartment building to pay $3.75 in quarters per load was maddening when my peers not only had their own laundry, they had it in the homes they owned in Alameda and Mill Valley. I decided it was time for a career change, and got into tech in 2014.

Many people thought it was cute that a non-profit marketing wonk and not-especially-young woman thought she could just change careers that way, laterally. And yet I not only did that, I stuck the landing, working as an experience engineer at MasterClass from Seed round through Series C.

My life became a bifurcated hellscape of success and suffering: the up-and-to-the-right start-up with parties at celebrities’ houses in Los Angeles on one side, and on the other a yawning pit of imposter syndrome and self-doubt fuelled by a toxic boss. I drank more than ever before, but it was “fun” and flashy with $15 cocktails and boozy brunches. I wasn’t nice, snapping and snarling at the most minor of injustices in my privileged life, but no one called me out on my drinking.

The last decade has been a rise in all facets of my life, especially when I entered recovery. I stopped being everyone else’s apostrophe and became my own person in the world. I transitioned to building software, working as a developer, designer, and product owner, leading strategy on apps I could only have dreamed of using in my previous careers. I moved to Seattle and met my husband. We bought my first home and remodelled it. Then we moved to Scotland and sold that house in the States. I took my first sabbatical and joined a degree program I was enchanted by the moment I heard about it at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

And soon, we move to continental Europe.

Our visa journey has been a saga, and everyone offers advice for what they think should work, based on what their cousin’s friend’s sister’s boyfriend did to stay. I try to smile and say we did everything our solicitor at a top immigration firm advised, but the rules of the game keep changing.

You already know how that ended. Jeff and I did not receive approval for Global Talent visas. What I have not written about is the rest of it, which is that I had choices which might have enabled us to stay, and I did not take them.

The Home Office said no, but so did I. 

In June of last year, I accepted a position as a product owner for an internal tool at the most prestigious university in town. It came with sponsorship. We already suspected the layoffs were coming at GoodNotes.

I rescinded my acceptance after considering it overnight. The role sat too close to the ethical core of AI usage in education, and I panicked. I think sometimes that was a mistake. I turned down our footing in this country, knowing what was probably about to happen to Jeff’s job, because I could not stomach spending my days trying to control the impact of a force too large for even my advanced sense-making.

Three months later the layoff came, and Jeff and his product partner were out.

There were other options. One initial interview for a job which offered skilled worker status covered how the design team had struggled after a private equity acquisition. The company expected me to make the depressed designers comply with the will of their new Bending Spoons-esque overlords. I was not being offered a job so much as a role in building the torment nexus. 

Pass.

Another interview was with the outgoing design leader, hiring his own replacement. His tenure was six years at the company, but only six months in the Head of Design role. I asked him why he was leaving now.

His answer was “Too many wounds.”

To which I politely, and as respectfully as I can, say: Fuck. That. Noise.

That sad Head of Design was a preview of what happens if you continue accepting inhumane terms until nothing remains; to sit with a stranger and utter three such devastating words. Cowering and showing our bellies to capitalism’s basest nature is not why we exist on this earth.

Am I terrified of starting my business? Abso-fucking-lutely.

But slowly suffocating inside the cage of a life not meant for me sounds a million times worse. I wrote in February about the creative spring I found here after burnout had scorched everything. I am not handing that back for a visa.

There are so many kind people here who want us to stay, and we want to stay, but not on those terms. Being chained to a skilled worker visa, which could evaporate overnight, as we have already learned it can, would double down on toxic liminality. And even a sponsorship I felt good about would not fix a government chasing its own tail over five years to settlement or ten. 

You cannot say fuck that noise to a policy. A policy is not refusing you. It simply has no slot for you, and no interest in being accommodating to edge cases. This is the point at which agency stops meaning being right and starts meaning choosing how to be happy.

So we chose. The Netherlands is not second prize. We originally planned to move to The Hague in 2025, and when Jeff got an offer in the UK in 2024, we decided why not try Scotland first.

We loved it here enough to try to stay, but I get the sense this works out for the best. We didn’t run from the US, and we are not running now. We want to continue to buy fresh groceries on foot or by bike every few days and travel everywhere by train, and we will have those things in our next home. I am not naïve enough to think everything will be perfect, but nowhere is. I own what I am not willing to do, while I acknowledge the privilege I have in making these choices. They are still difficult, uprooting everything yet again.

As a kid, I loved the county fair with its sketchy rides and plethora of fried foods. The only ride my mom would go on was a bright yellow affair called the Shooting Star (or maybe Falling Star): several tiered rows of seats on a large rectangular platform. The whole seating section would start by lifting gently left, then right, in bigger and bigger swings, falling back around again until eventually it thrust up into the air and left us all floating for a moment at the top, going all the way around a few times.

That floating weightlessness at the top is what this moment feels like. 

Yet, I am also feeling the gravity of some long-term health issues.

You do not know how important your spleen is until you risk losing it. We hope I can keep it, or at least enough of it, but a series of ultrasounds, CT scans, and MRIs are leading me on a merry journey of discovery. I am a walking collection of inherited auto-immune issues, and I have been most of my life. I am always struggling to keep in balance, but this one feels scarier. Especially in the middle of an international move. 

This is the problem I cannot negotiate. I can decline a job offer. I can refuse a visa’s terms and go somewhere else. I cannot tell my immune system that I am not willing to accept what it is proposing, and I cannot interview the cyst on my spleen about why it is causing havoc. My spleen has no position on my agency whatsoever. It is not even indifferent, because indifference would require it to have noticed me at all.

If I am honest about my mortality, I don’t think I will see 100. I joke I’ll take quality over quantity, but it isn’t said in jest. Jeff is 6 years older than me. My sisters are 8, 10, and 12 years older than I am. My greatest fear is not dying. It is being the last one left, if Jeff and my sisters go before me. If your spouse precedes you in death, you are a widow. Are you still a sister if none of your siblings are left?

Sometimes I think about the exact amount of butter I should eat to die peacefully around the same time as my most loved humans. Too much, and I go too soon… too little, and well, that sounds lonely. 

I’ll consider myself lucky if I make it to 80.  

I’d love to turn 84, because that is 2061, and Halley’s comet comes back. I recall it as a bright smear across the sky of Nevada City in 1986, just before I turned 9. Like a parcel of stars shooting, not falling, into the future.

The comet is not interested in whether I am there, or which hemisphere I view it from. It is coming either way, on a schedule set long before humans, just as Fortune’s wheel is going to turn regardless. I will never have ultimate control. But I take the agency I have, and I will not cede the choices that are still mine.

I’m going to live the fuck out of however many days, months, years, or decades I may have left, because I can. Because the world is big. Because I refuse to lead a tiny life bookended by if and when.