Back in My Hands

There is a year I would leave off the résumé. A project ended badly. A security incident kept me half-awake for weeks. At the end, the car took the hit on the driver's side.

For a long time after that, I did not open the laptop. There was work. I could not sit down to do it.

The knowledge stays in a year like that. The routines stay. The reflexes stay. Trust goes: whether there will be work where I can use any of it again.

The work I did not get to close

By then I was tired of doing my part, then watching other people decide what it was worth. I did not mind critique. Good critique makes the work sharper. What wore me down was seeing the same work matter in one place and turn into background noise in another.

That kind of work looks like autonomy from the outside. From the inside, it gets tiring when you carry the responsibility and the final decision lives somewhere else.

Then came the months where the technical problem was joined by a physical one. After the hospital, one thing was clear: I did not want work where I carry the responsibility and someone else holds the decision.

Why I work solo now

I do not work solo because teams are bad. Some of my best work came from building with good people. In a good team, disagreement helps.

Right now, I need to carry a product from start to finish. I decide what matters. I review what I build. I fix it when I made the wrong call.

I am building Phora and titkar.ai that way now. There are small decisions, broken parts, fixes, rewrites. All of them belong to me. It is not more comfortable, but I can see more clearly what I did well and what I need to fix.

What I could still reach for

I did not become grateful for the bad year. It did not turn into a clean origin story. The crash stayed a crash, the project stayed a project, the incident stayed an incident. What changed is that I can see more clearly what kind of work I can carry and what kind I cannot.

It helped when I could see the work as one piece again. I understand the problem, decide, build, review, ship. When that does not have to split into five separate conversations, the kind of attention I can work from comes back.

What pulled me back in was finishing something again, without dropping it halfway.