For those of us privileged enough, like me, to have been able to work from home in 2020, the year felt like one very very long month of March. Am I right?

If you’re reading this, you’ve made it to 2021, no small feat!

Here are five observations of my professional life as a UX designer that I found worth noting.

It’s more than possible to acquire new technical skills even late in your career.

After initial resistance due to five years of hard-won experience using Sketch, I learned how to use Figma, including its spiffed up auto layouts feature. …

Late middle age is when you've lived enough to have gained some wisdom, and wise enough to realize most young people don't want to hear it yet.

How times have changed.

In the early weeks of the pandemic in the U.S., my local jurisdiction outside Washington, D.C. instituted a shutdown. Grocery chains created seniors shopping times, at the butt-crack of dawn. (This was at a time when fomite transmission was still considered a significant risk, so letting seniors shop before the store opened for everyone made sense.)

Between being barely awake, my glasses fogging up on the walk to the store, and the extra 30 minutes tacked on at home to wipe everything down, grocery shopping became onerous, and a bit scary.

After a month of this…

What my younger self would have liked to have known

I’m mostly happy with my job as a UX designer. I think that I make a difference within the teams I’m part of, and that I’m helping further my organization’s mission, which played a large role in accepting the job.

But recently I had a small epiphany: A coworker was designing 404 pages with cool images and funny copy, while I was building a spreadsheet totaling up and categorizing hundreds of responses to a user survey. …

43-year-old star Vince Carter, remembers making the last shot of his covid19-shortened basketball career — a three-pointer from one of the greatest dunk artists — right before the NBA shut down in March.

Every athlete, whether a multimillionaire superstar or a weekend warrior (or mid-week warrior in my case), wants to go out on her own terms. I’m no different.

I don’t remember anything specific about my last game except that we — responsible middle-aged women including an ESL teacher and a pathologist — washed our hands with soap in the girl’s bathroom at the end of the game, at…

Twenty-six years after my sister’s sudden, untimely death, I still don’t know where her ashes are. As with both my parents, I had no chance to say goodbye before she passed.

Each of us during this pandemic goes through what Dan Sheehan called “hell zones.” Mine have to do with being reminded of the “lack of closure” that comes with a loved one dying in an ICU they can’t visit, a funeral they can’t have, a shiva they can’t sit.

A few years after my Mother passed away (thankfully, as she wanted, in her sleep), my Dad and I had…

THE DESIGN LIFE

A number of years ago, I attended a talk by Petrula Vrontikis* where she described the four stages of competence: first is the period when you are unconsciously incompetent (you don’t know what you don’t know). Then comes a phase when you are consciously incompetent — which should spark you to hone your craft and aim for conscious competence! Finally, after struggle and learning from mistakes, you should arrive at unconscious competence, at least in some areas of your field, where the practice of your skills becomes second nature. This past year, I think I’ve arrived. Here’s how I know.

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THE CULT OF PRODUCTIVITY

Search on the term “bullet journal changed my life” and you will get more than 13 million results. This article won’t be one of them.

My age may make me immune for life-changing-ness, though I will confess that I can recall a very few such events earlier in my life: going to an art colony at age 30, which started me on a lifelong creative journey; overcoming a personal crisis after blithely imagining that selling a condo, quitting a job, and moving to a city where I knew no one would be a piece of cake at midlife. (Spoiler: it…