So. Let's get the actual timeline straight, because I've been sloppy about it even in my own head.
A full year of nothing — June 2025 to June 2026 — and then six posts landed in a single day, like a dam giving way. And then it went quiet again. Not a year quiet. A few weeks quiet. Which is a very different thing, and worth being honest about, because "I've been silent for a year" and "I went quiet for a few weeks after finally saying something" are not the same story, even if they feel the same from the inside.
So here's the real shape of it: a long silence, a flood, and then a smaller, more ordinary pause. This post is about all three.
What the Long Silence Was Actually About
I wasn't disappearing because things were fine and there was nothing to say. I was disappearing because there was too much happening, and none of it was the kind of thing you casually blog about.
Some of it was health. I picked up some new diagnoses in that stretch, and my health got worse in ways that genuinely reshaped what an ordinary day looks like for me. Not a temporary blip you push through — a real, load-bearing change to how much I have to give on any given day, and what it costs me to give it.
And underneath that, my workplace — the place that has always been my safe space, the one part of my life that felt steady no matter what else was going on — went through three rounds of redundancies. Three. Watching that happen, and living inside the uncertainty of it, did something to my sense of safety that I'm still not fully done metabolising. When the one place you'd counted on to hold still, stops holding still, it turns out that it costs you more bandwidth than you'd think, even if your own job is not always the one on the line.
Put those two things together and you get a person who is technically still functioning — still doing the job, still showing up — but with nothing left over. Blogging is the first thing to go when your bandwidth is gone, because it's the thing nobody's waiting on. No user complained. No sprint depended on it. So it was the safest thing to drop, and I dropped it.
The Flood in June
I think that's also why June 2026 came out the way it did — six posts, one day, no warning. When you've been sitting on that much for that long, and you finally get a sliver of room to breathe, it doesn't come out as one polite, well-paced post. It came out all at once, because there was a backlog of things I'd wanted to say for a year and no orderly way to say them one at a time.
If you've ever gone quiet somewhere in your own life — with a friend, a hobby, a piece of work — and then come back with far more than you meant to say, you'll recognise this. The volume isn't drama. It's just what happens when the tap's been off for a long time.
And Then Quiet Again, More Ordinarily
The few weeks since June don't have some big reveal behind them. That's sort of the point. The health stuff didn't resolve itself just because I'd written about it. The aftershocks of watching your workplace go through repeated redundancies don't tidily wrap up either — you just carry a low hum of "is it going to happen again" for a while. Work kept happening. Life kept happening. And "write something for the blog" kept losing, quietly, to whatever was more urgent that day. Which is a much more mundane story than the year before it, and I think that's actually a healthier place to be.
Coming Back Anyway
I'm not going to close this with a tidy lesson, because I don't think there is one yet. My health isn't fixed. My workplace's stability isn't guaranteed just because the redundancy rounds have stopped. I haven't developed some new discipline that means I'll never go quiet again.
What I do know is that waiting until everything is settled before I write again means I might never write again, because "settled" isn't really on offer right now. So this is me writing anyway, in the middle of it, rather than waiting for the version of my life where it would be easier.
If you're in your own version of this — carrying something heavy that nobody outside your house can see, in a job or a place that doesn't feel as safe as it used to — I'm not going to tell you to push through it or find the silver lining. I'm just going to say: the quiet isn't a character flaw. It's just what bandwidth limits look like from the outside.
Until next time, my product fiends 💀. Thanks for still being here.
