Writing is hard. Writing a blog about DIYs, life, love and the pursuits of nerds is even harder. The passion for storytell is rapidly diluted by the hardships of being a female engineer – married, motherless, and with no children – a unicorn in the world of geeks and STEM. My need to share my own experiences is embittered, soured by my need to feel relevant in a world that disenfranchises women and minorities; the two groups I proudly belong to by heritage and statistical probability. My mission is to leave a legacy that will outlive me and define me for future cyber archeologists and anthropologists as a pioneer, a resilient beacon of hope for those coming up behind me.
I wasn’t prepared to continue to pave the way for Latinxs everywhere. I thought the road was already established… Smh!
It may seem a bit self absorbed, overly dramatic even, but keeping the wisdom of my semi-charmed kind of life private would have been selfish. Never did I ever imagine that breaking the glass ceiling was still going to be women’s war cry. I really thought my degrees and grace under pressure would result in career path glory. Boy was I wrong! Nothing good or remotely exciting has happened to me in years. My stories come from a position of strife and reckoning. Sadness drags me through a life where others expect me to care about everyone their happiness while I only blossom and learn from struggle and loss. Trying to care about everything effectively became caring about nothing at all.
The minutiae of adulting swallows my ingenuity whole.
You’d think that after the layoff and rehiring I’d have a full social calendar, or at the very least be brimming with business ideas or propositions to develop. Unfortunately that is not the case. Nothing worth pursuing energizes me, and in really bad days, not even writing makes me feel whole. Living in the USA forces me to think and speak in mostly English, an arduous task that mentally depletes me resulting in a thick heavy accent that is barely understandable by the end of the day. By Wednesday morning I can’t think straight in any language! Infiltrating the male dominated engineering field has been more of a social experiment and less of a technical journey. Even if the Gods themselves annointed me as a technical leader and prodigy, no one would have believed I was capable anyway. Ugh!
It is what it is!
In five years of posts in over 25+ categories, I haven’t been able to find the product in me that can make me rich as I die trying. As resourceful as I am solving problems, I’m having a hard time reading and solving my own. Clarity eludes me. Typing up words on a simulated keyboard isn’t helping either. I’m a dimmed LED bulb hoping to be switched to a brighter color setting. The internal light dulled by fears and doubt. Failure is an option but success, well success secretly scares me. I rather have nothing to lose, than lose everything to indifference and inaction.
Resting in your laurels isn’t sustainable anymore.
Maybe 2020 is the year of letting the flow take me, against my will, to a place I can really discover the greatness within; a purpose for this Jane of All Trades. To find a place of forgiveness, candor and joy that isn’t tainted by years of sticking it to The Man. A spring of self motivation and confidence. The idea of this endeavor was to enlighten myself in the same way I’ve been told I enlighten others, not to spin in circles trying to accomplish everything and nothing at the same time. I need peace; a catharsis. Bigger and grander dreams. Annointed success. Hopefully, I’ll find it all soon. If not, I’ll forge ahead until it finds me.
Onwards an upwards my friends!
Mrs. Enginerd - Nerd Whisperer 