I spent 15 years being good at systems. I just didn't know why — or what it was costing me.

I came to software engineering sideways. Before code, I spent over 15 years in communications, customer service, and systems building — work that required exactly the kind of pattern recognition, detail orientation, and systems thinking that neurodivergent brains are often exceptional at. I just didn't have that language for it yet.

In 2020, during the pandemic, I enrolled in a part-time software development bootcamp. I wanted to make the formal leap into tech. What I didn't know was that I was also walking into the most clarifying — and most destabilizing — period of my life.

I got my first engineering job in 2021 at Zappos.com. I was proud. I was also, quietly, falling apart in ways I couldn't name yet.

That same year I received an official ADHD diagnosis. I'd had it my whole life. Suddenly, a lot of things made sense — and a lot of other things got harder, because now I had to actually look at them.

I'd been living with fibromyalgia since 2016 and chronic migraines since the same year. In 2018 I was bedbound for nine months. My body had been telling me something for years. I was only beginning to learn how to listen.

Being a new software engineer while also being a newly-diagnosed neurodivergent person with a chronic illness in a brand-new corporate environment at Zappos, during its post-holacracy transition into full Amazon ownership, wasn't a gap-year story. That's just what it was. Hard. Clarifying. Mine.

Then I was laid off in January 2023. That moment hurt, and it also forced a reckoning: I could see how much people-pleasing had shaped the way I worked, while emotional sustainability was treated as optional. That layoff became the turning point that pushed me into the deep end of building what Pythoness Programmer is becoming.

What helped wasn't a system. It was people. A TikTok community of late-identified and lifelong neurodivergent adults who were naming patterns I'd been carrying alone. Marginalized voices who had been talking for years about how our systems — tech systems, productivity systems, social systems — were built to serve a particular kind of brain and body, and how everyone else was just expected to adapt.

I'm near Richmond, Virginia — where I went to college, where I took my first steps into adulthood, and where, in 2020, I watched confederate statues come down in the streets. That wasn't just a national moment. It was a collective reckoning happening in a place I know, in a community I belong to — a visible, physical act of examining what had been inherited, erected, and normalized, and deciding to stop carrying it.

The BLM protests of 2020 cracked something open in me about decolonization — about what it means to look honestly at the systems we've inherited and internalized, and stop blaming ourselves for struggling inside them. That framework didn't just change how I thought about society. It changed how I thought about my tools. Not how everyone else was using them — how I was using them, and what that revealed about what I'd absorbed without question.

That's where the Pythoness Programmer comes from. Not from having it all figured out. From building the reflection skills in the middle of the hardest stretch — and refusing to stop once I got through it.