Man, 2019. What a year. When I think back to my “Pisces career” in 2019, it was just… a whole thing, you know? Started off feeling a bit like I was swimming in circles, which, I guess, is pretty on brand for a Pisces. I was at this job, right, doing a lot of the same stuff day in and day out. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t lighting any fires either. Just kind of coasting.
I remember just kinda dragging myself to work most mornings. My brain felt fuzzy. I’d sit down, open up the same old files, deal with the same old people, and just push through. We had this big project kick-off in Q1, I think it was. They wanted us to revamp the whole client communication system. My role was mostly just picking up the pieces, making sure the data flowed from one spot to another. It felt like I was spending hours staring at spreadsheets, trying to make heads or tails of some ancient coding someone else had put together years ago. Seriously, it was like reading hieroglyphs. I’d try to fix one thing, and three other things would break. It was frustrating as heck.
I kept thinking, “Is this it? Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?” I tried to get into it, really. I’d stay late sometimes, trying to dig deeper, understand the bigger picture. I even bought a couple of online courses, thinking maybe if I learned some new fancy tech stuff, I’d suddenly feel inspired. I’d fire up those lessons after dinner, telling myself, “Tonight, you’re going to transform!” But usually, after about twenty minutes, my eyes would start glazing over, and I’d just end up watching cat videos or something equally useless. The motivation just wasn’t sticking.
Things started to shift a bit around summer. Not like a dramatic lightning bolt, more like a slow, creeping realization. My team got a new lead, a real go-getter kind of person. She came in, saw all our old ways of doing things, and just started asking, “Why?” A lot of “Why do we do it this way?” and “Why can’t we try that?” At first, it was annoying, because, well, change is annoying. But then, she started pushing us to actually think, to question. She pushed me to take on more responsibility, to actually speak up in meetings instead of just nodding along. I remember her telling me once, “You have good ideas, why are you keeping them to yourself?”
That really hit me. I had ideas? I didn’t even think I had ideas! I thought I was just there to process stuff. So, I started trying. Small things at first. In one meeting, I blurted out an idea about automating a report we did manually every week. Everyone just looked at me. My heart was pounding. But then, the new lead, she latched onto it. “That’s a great idea! Let’s explore that!”
Next thing I knew, I was actually leading a small task force to automate that report. Me! I had to figure out what tools we needed, talk to different departments, even learn a bit of scripting myself. It was a proper mess at times. I screwed up, oh boy, did I screw up. Sent out a test report with completely wrong numbers once, almost gave our boss a heart attack. But I picked myself up, figured out what went wrong, and fixed it.
By the end of the year, that report was running smoothly, all automated. It saved us hours every week. And it felt amazing. It wasn’t about the big, grand career leap, but about finally grabbing hold of something and actually seeing it through. I wasn’t just swimming in circles anymore; I was actually moving the needle, even if it was just a little one.
I realized then that my “Pisces career” in 2019 wasn’t about some predestined path or a sudden burst of genius. It was about someone else seeing something in me I didn’t, and then me finally doing something about it. I started 2019 feeling lost, and I ended it feeling like I’d found a paddle, and I was actually using it to steer. It wasn’t a perfect year, not by a long shot, but it was the year I stopped just drifting and started trying to make waves. And that felt like a pretty big win, honestly.
