It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m not sure what to do with myself.

For five years, December 31^st meant checking on my mother, making sure she was comfortable, and wondering what the next year would bring for her care. This year, I’m sitting in a quiet house with no one to check on. She passed in late October, and I’m still adjusting to the absence…to the quiet.

This post isn’t about lessons learned or growth through adversity. I don’t have those wrapped up neatly yet. It’s just an honest look at a year that was harder than I expected, and some tentative thoughts about what might come next.

The Vacancy

There’s a strange thing that happens when caregiving ends. You spend years building routines around someone else’s needs. Their schedule becomes yours. Their health becomes your constant background process, always running, always monitoring. Then it stops, and you don’t know what to do with the processing cycles you suddenly have back.

There was never a question on “if” I’d be a caregiver, it was simply a thing that needed to be done when the moment suddenly arose. I’d been a caregiver for over five years. That’s long enough for it to become identity, not just role. When people asked what I did, “caregiver” was part of the answer. Now there’s a vacancy where that identity used to be, and I haven’t figured out what fills it.

The house is quieter. The rhythms are different. I still find myself listening for sounds that aren’t coming anymore.

When Work Stops Feeding You

Parallel to the caregiving transition, something shifted at work this year that I’m still processing.

I’ve written before about intrinsic motivation, about how genuine passion for the problem being solved is what separates meaningful work from performance theater. This year, I watched my own role drift from projects that sparked that intrinsic drive toward work that needed to be done but didn’t light anything up inside me.

There’s a particular emptiness when you’re technically competent at something you no longer find meaningful. You can execute. You can deliver. You can hit the metrics. But the thing that used to make you stay late because you wanted to, the curiosity that pulled you into problems on weekends, that fades. And you notice its absence more than you ever noticed its presence.

I don’t have a resolution to this. Some of it might be grief bleeding into everything else. Some of it might be a genuine signal that something needs to change. I’m not sure yet. I’m trying to give myself permission to not be sure and have very candid conversations with my peers and leaders about my thoughts.

The Speed of Everything

Meanwhile, the technology landscape kept accelerating in ways that felt both exciting and exhausting.

AI tools evolved faster than I could integrate them into practice. The posts I’ve written this year about leveraging AI already feel dated. Game development workflows changed. The “vibe coding” movement made it possible to build functional tools in hours instead of weeks.

Some of that speed was genuinely useful. When Mom entered hospice, I built a management system to track medications, visits, and care notes with our agency rather than notebooks. It wasn’t polished, but it worked, and I built it in a weekend using tools that didn’t exist two years ago. Later, I built an AI prompting tool that’s become part of my daily workflow. These weren’t production applications. They were solutions to immediate problems, built fast because the tools finally allowed fast.

But the pace is also unsettling. The feeling of perpetually being behind, of yesterday’s knowledge already being obsolete. I’m not sure if that’s the field moving too fast or me moving too slow. Probably both.

What Kept Me Sane

The thing that surprised me most this year was how much new connections mattered.

I’m not naturally a joiner. Professional communities and online groups always felt like obligations more than opportunities. But this year, facing what I was facing, I leaned into some new communities and found something I didn’t expect.

The people I met through various groups and shared interests became a genuine support network. When Mom passed, they showed up in ways I didn’t know to ask for. The interconnectedness that I’d always viewed skeptically turned out to be exactly what I needed when isolation would have been easy and probably destructive.

I don’t have a framework for this, but I know that the relationships built this year carried weight I didn’t anticipate. That seems worth noting as the year closes.

Looking Forward

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: with the caregiving chapter closed, I have freedom I haven’t had in five years. Writing that feels crude. The freedom exists because someone I loved is gone. Those two facts sit next to each other, unresolved.

But the freedom is real, and pretending otherwise doesn’t honor anything.

For the first time in years, I can think about what I want without calculating impact on someone else’s care. Travel that wasn’t possible. Projects that required sustained attention I couldn’t give. Time that was always borrowed against other obligations. Heck, for the first time in these five years, I’m back in my own home–relearning the rhythms of my own life.

Do I have resolutions? Not yet. The typical New Year’s list feels premature when I’m still figuring out who I am without the role that defined the last five years. What I have instead is permission to figure it out. A year to focus on myself without guilt, or at least with less guilt.

Maybe that’s enough for now.

I don’t usually write posts this personal. The blog is typically about engineering, gaming, product thoughtwork, and technology observations. But New Year’s Eve invites reflection, and this is what’s actually on my mind as 2025 closes.

If you’re going through something similar—caregiving ending, grief, the strange relief that follows—I don’t have advice, but I have empathy and, if interested, an ear. I have recognition that it’s complicated and doesn’t resolve cleanly. That’s okay. It doesn’t have to.

Here’s to figuring out what comes next in ‘26.