Man, 2021. What a mess that year was for everyone, right? Me too. I was stuck in this rut, working a job I hated, and my relationship? It was just coasting. We were roommates who occasionally used the same couch. I knew something had to give, but I was just sitting there, waiting for the universe to send me a carrier pigeon with instructions.
Then I stumbled upon this thing, this monthly horoscope reading for Virgos, specifically for May 2021. I remember the title flashing at me: “Big Changes Are Coming for Relationships!” You gotta be kidding me, I thought. I usually roll my eyes at that stuff, but my life was so stagnant that even a cheesy prediction felt like a life raft.
The Moment I Decided to Stop Waiting
I read the whole thing three times. It didn’t say good change or bad change, just big change. I had spent so long complaining to my buddies about how miserable I was that I suddenly realized something simple, yet profound. If big changes were coming, why the heck should I let them just happen to me? If the stars were lining up a shake-up, I was going to be the one holding the damn shovel and digging the foundation for the new building.
I was fed up with the dead-end corporate job, too. Same desks, same meetings, same terrible coffee. Everything in my life felt like a rerun. So, I connected the dots. The relationship was stale, and so was my career path. Maybe the universe wasn’t just talking about my dating life; maybe it meant my relationship with my entire existence.
- Step One: The Cleanup. I didn’t wait until May. It was still late April. I started with the clutter. Not just my apartment, but my commitments. I deleted old contacts I never spoke to. I started saying “no” to things that wasted my time. It was a massive mental shift.
- Step Two: The Conversation. That was the hardest part. I sat down with my partner and just laid it all out. No yelling, no drama, just a quiet, honest conversation about how we were both just existing near each other and how that wasn’t fair to either of us. It was sad, sure, but it felt right. We agreed to move on.
- Step Three: The Leap. I didn’t have a new job lined up. This is where everyone I knew called me nuts. I handed in my notice at work a few days later. No plan B. I had some savings, enough for maybe three months, and that was it. My boss looked at me like I’d grown a second head. I just said, “Time for a big change.”
I figured I’d spend May and June doing some freelance coding work, just to keep the lights on, and look for something new. But then the weirdest thing happened. That clean slate, the massive emotional and physical space I created by ditching the old stuff, it opened a door I didn’t even know existed.
The Real ‘Big Change’
I was just posting about the whole mess on a coding forum—how I quit my job and ended my relationship based on a goofy horoscope, just to share the sheer absurdity of my life choices. Turns out, people really liked the way I explained things. Not the code, not the horoscope, but the story of the process. The rough-around-the-edges, honest breakdown of the journey.
A guy who ran a small online tech publication messaged me. He didn’t want code. He wanted me to write about my experiences, my projects, my failures, my whole messy workflow, in exactly that blunt, direct way. He said there was too much perfect-sounding corporate language out there and he needed something real.
I started with one post a week. No fancy terms, no glossing over the screw-ups. I just wrote down what I did, what broke, and what I learned. It was easy because it was just a record of my day-to-day work, not some polished essay. That one post a week turned into two, then that publication started paying me more than my old corporate salary. Before I knew it, I was consulting, writing these posts, and actually enjoying what I did every morning.
The horoscope said “Big Changes Are Coming for Relationships” in May 2021. The relationship with my partner ended, sure, that was the surface change. But the real big change was the one that followed—the relationship with my career, the relationship with my own time, the relationship with sharing my life online. That whole crazy, unplanned pivot—from a corporate drone to this guy who just writes about his journey—happened because I got sick of waiting for the stars to do the work. I just grabbed the prediction and used it as the kick in the pants I needed to finally take action.
Sometimes you just gotta break things to build something better.
