My quiet year

12 months ago I stopped being a user researcher in government. I became a product manager (a job I've never done before) working for a charity (a sector I've never worked for) in a tiny precarious startup (a context I've never experienced).

It's been a lot of change. Which has meant a lot of learning, a lot of imposter syndrome, and a lot of self-doubt. I'm OK with these things. I’ve learned that I like pulling the rug out from under my own feet every few years. I'm weird like that.

What I don’t like so much is that I stopped writing.

Last year was a loud year

I wrote loads in the 12 months before I changed jobs.

I'd written some posts about important things I’d learned about user research before I stopped being a user researcher. The posts about discoveries have taken on a little life of their own which makes me happy every time they pop up from nowhere.

I'd written some more personal posts too. I wrote about the lessons I’d learned after turning 40. Writing that post showed me the power of opening up about my own interior world. A lot of my friends who don't work in my world, and who have never read any of my stuff, read that post. It sparked all kinds of conversations with them that I never expected to have. Deep and meaningfuls. On reflection, I'd spent years trying to write in a kind of abstract, know-it-all, here-are-the-rules-for-the-world kind of way. I think my writing is better when it's specifically about me and what I've learned. Writing about specifics made people more likely to see themselves in my words.

I'd even done a crazy scary talk at a conference in front of hundreds of people. It seems like a weird dream now, but I stood up and challenged some received wisdom about user research. It was OK to do this, just like it had been OK to stand up at GDS and challenge their received wisdom three years earlier. My mind does an amazing job of telling me it won't be OK, but I'm working on challenging received wisdom without a long delay next time. I'm trying to live more like The Courage to be Disliked.

This year has been a quiet year

In the 12 months since I changed jobs I’ve hardly written anything. There are reasons.

I haven't had the space to write much. Work has been full on. At Local Welcome we've been trying to stand up a national charity from scratch with a tiny team of people. Many of whom (like me) have never done the jobs we're doing before. It has taken a lot of my mental energy just to keep things going at work. I've not felt much like writing about it because it's been so full on.

I'm so new as a product manager that I've not got much to say (yet). The posts that I wrote about user research came from years of hard-won experience. In the last 12 months I've learned interesting things about roadmapping, testing risky assumptions, making the transition from building to operating, and being OK with things being broken around me the whole time. But I'm in no rush to write about these things. Those words will come in time. (Also, as a side note, I've watched my ego trying to bask in the status it was getting from those user research blog posts and conference talks. I think it's been good to dial that side of myself down for a while.)

I've been trying to balance my life outside work with my life inside work. In 2014 I realised I’ve got a tendency to get way too involved in my work. I burned out. My relationship suffered. I didn't see enough of my friends. I got less and less healthy. And I was just plain unhappy in a way I'd never been in my life before. So for the last five years (such a long time!) I've been trying to get my work in better harmony with my life. Working four days a week has helped me put up boundaries to leave work behind when I go home for the weekend. These boundaries are great, but I’m realising that refusing to ever think about work stuff at the weekend makes it impossible to write about work stuff at the weekend. And that’s the only time I have.

Finally, and this is a lot more raw, my mum's had cancer this year. She was diagnosed in March and has since had a successful operation and chemotherapy. The last scan showed that she's clear, for now at least, so I feel like I'm coming up for air after eight months of chaos. I love my mum to bits and it's been hard. During this time, my subconscious has been throwing up surprises from leftfield to the point where I gave up on knowing what I was thinking or feeling. None of this felt like something I could write about, even if I wanted to (which I didn't), because it was about much more than just me. It even got to the point where it felt like posting about anything on Twitter was this odd unreal experience because I wasn't acknowledging this huge truth going on in my life. So I just stopped being on Twitter for a while.

I’ve missed writing though

Stopping writing has made me realise how important writing had become in my life.

Some of this is about the ego and the affirmation. I'll own that. I might wish I didn't care about those things but I'd be lying. My ego is real.

But it's more than just ego. There's something about the headspace of getting my thoughts down in an order, editing them to feel like a finished object, and putting them out into the world that is unlike anything else that I do in my life.

It's not like talking to people. It's not like writing copy at work. It's not like texting or whatsapping or slacking. It's not like giving a presentation. Weirdly, it's not even like writing morning pages (which I do most days) because those words are never intended to be read by anyone. They lack a certain sharpness and consideration.

I’ve realised that writing things to be read by others is, for me, a thing that matters. It’s a different way of being with myself. It's part of my balance for a healthy life. Like riding my bike, or cooking my own food, or seeing friends I love. And I miss it.

It’s been hard to start writing again

But once I'd stopped writing for a while - once I'd sunk deep into this quiet year - it's become harder to imagine stepping back into a louder life. The task of writing the first thing in a year started to feel daunting. I've had a go a few times and been scared off.

Until today.

I'm on the train to Wakefield. It's a long journey because of engineering. I’m reading Anna Goss, Holly Challenger, Sonia Turcotte and Jay Owens. People whose writing I love. Partly inspired by them, partly by train boredom, and partly by the neat fact that it’s exactly one year since my last post, I decided it was time to get over myself.

So here we are. I’m writing again. I've filled in some gaps of my quiet year. I've cleared the decks. I've told pieces of my story that I wasn't sure how to tell. Even the hard parts. Especially the hard parts. It feels like a weight has been lifted.

I'm intrigued to see what comes next.

Let me know what you think on @myddelton. Still getting used to tweeting again…