I was a mobile application developer once.
I got my feet into Android when it was still new. Before that, I built mobile games. Actual games, with logic and design and the particular satisfaction of making something work that did not exist before. I was good at it. More than that — I was interested in it, which is a different thing entirely.
That version of me feels both very close and very far away.
The Year the Break Started
Singapore was not planned. The move happened suddenly — the way these things do when a spouse’s opportunity arrives and the family follows. I found work there — a local company, a reasonable role. But the hours were what they were, and I had already begun to understand something about myself: home and family were not negotiables for me. Non-negotiable not because I did not want to work — I did — but because my brain could not stop doing the maths. Early morning chores, then work, then back home to finish what was left. IT deadlines do not work nine to five. The two worlds did not fit together the way I needed them to.
So after about a year, I stopped.
I told myself it was temporary. Most of us do.
The break that begins as a pause has a way of becoming something else. Not through any single decision — but through the accumulation of life. The next country. The planning for a family. The realisation that someone has to be the default, and in most households, that someone is already decided before the conversation begins.
I became the default. Willingly, at first. Then less willingly. Then so automatically that I stopped tracking when the choice had stopped being mine.
What I Did Instead
Here is the thing about creative people who stop their main work — they do not actually stop. They redirect.
I made rangolis. Not the simple floor patterns — the ready-made kind, the kind that took real design thinking. I was good at that too. It did not progress into anything, but I was making things, which is what makers do when they cannot make the thing they actually want to make.
And I wrote. I had a blogspot (https://dreamzpay.blogspot.com) — one of those qui (et corners of the internet that nobody reads except occasionally, by accident, and sometimes by design. I wrote whatever interested me. No audience, no purpose, no plan. Just the habit of putting words to things because leaving them unworded felt like waste.
That blogspot followed me across countries without making a sound. Singapore. Then Australia — Sydney, specifically. And it was there, quietly, that something small happened.
I was looking for work — anything, to begin with. I applied to an NGO. The blog worked as my portfolio. They took me in. No pay. Small platform. Completely unremarkable by any external measure.
I enjoyed it more than I can explain.
That enjoyment was information. I filed it away and did not look at it closely for a long time.
The Years That Filled Everything Else
Then the twins arrived and the years filled up in the way that only people with young children fully understand — not just with tasks but with a particular quality of fullness that leaves no gap for the question of who you are outside of this.
I got a Montessori certificate. Joined a school. Worked for a year. The pattern held — a year, sometimes less, then the circumstances shifted and the work stopped and I was back to being the default again.
My father’s health deteriorated. Then he passed. And somewhere in managing that loss — managing my own grief and my mother’s and the daily logistics of everything that needed continuing to function — the question of what I wanted for myself became almost absurd. You do not ask that question in the middle of a crisis. You just keep going.
So I kept going.
What Staying Costs
Eighteen years since I married. Eighteen years since the break began in Singapore.
I want to be careful here, because I do not want to reduce eighteen years to a loss. They were not a loss. They were a life — a full one, a real one, with things in it that matter enormously to me. My children. The countries I have lived in. The things I have learned about myself through the specific friction of a life that did not go as planned.
But there is an honest accounting to be done too.
It cost me the thread back to myself. Not all at once — piece by piece. The career set aside. The creative work that almost began and then did not. The income that was never stable enough to feel like ground. The slow erosion of knowing what I would do if no one needed anything from me.
That last one is the most disorienting. When you have been the default for long enough, you can forget what your own preferences feel like. What you actually want to do with a free morning. What interests you when interest is not in service of anyone else’s needs.
You forget the shape of yourself.
What Finding Myself Actually Looks Like
It does not look dramatic. There is no single morning where I woke up and knew.
It looks like this: I am starting again with the writing. Quietly, without announcement, without certainty about where it goes. The blogspot that followed me across continents has a new name now — skymusings — and I am sitting with it the same way I sat with the old one. Writing what interests me. Putting words to things that would otherwise go unworded.
It looks like noticing that I still have things to say. That the eighteen years have not emptied me — they have, in their difficult way, filled me with something. Observations. Patience. The particular understanding that comes from having carried a great deal and paid attention while doing it.
It looks like accepting that the path back to yourself is not a straight line. That you can be a mobile app developer and a rangoli maker and a Montessori teacher and an NGO writer and a blogger and a mother and a daughter and a default — and still be, underneath all of those, yourself. Waiting. Not gone.
Just waiting for the conditions to come back.
To You, Reading This
Maybe you recognise something in this. The career that paused and never quite restarted. The creative work that went underground and survived there, quietly, because makers make things even when no one is watching. The version of yourself you set aside meaning to return to, and looked up one day to find several years had passed.
You are not gone either.
The things you were good at before the break — they are still in you. Dormant, maybe. Quieter than they used to be. But not gone.
The thread back to yourself is thinner than you would like after all this time. But it is still there. I know because I have been following mine — through a blogspot, through an NGO that paid nothing, through a Montessori classroom, through years of being the default.
It leads somewhere. I am not sure where yet.
But I am following it.
And after eighteen years of looking elsewhere — that feels like enough of a beginning.
Are you finding your way back to something you set aside? I would love to hear your story.