While this blog might not really show it, 2014 was one of the best and worst years of my life.

Professionally, it was a landmark year. In March, I left my job with Valiant Technology, the place that got me out of Philadelphia and into NYC. The end of my time with Valiant also marked the end of my time in that part of the IT industry after nearly 10 years. Goodbye, Hyper-V; hello, Heroku.The plan was to get a startup off the ground. It didn't exactly work out that way, but something even better happened: I realized how much I needed to grow by allowing Neo4j.rb to consume me.

Working with Neo4j and parent Neo Technology resulted in trips to Malmö, Sweden and San Francisco. It opened countless doors, helped me make lot of new friends, and helped me find a sense of both community and professional satisfaction that I've never really known. I wrote a lot of blog posts and made nearly 1500 commits on Github. Phillymetal.com relaunched, I participated in a whirlwind hackathon (that I'll link to when I move it to its new home), and just generally made a ton of stuff I'm extremely proud of. I put my ADHD hyper-focus to use and learned, learned, learned.

There was stress — a shitload of it. If not for the patience and support of my amazing girlfriend, who also left her job for the big ???? of freelance life only to end up in a fantastic new role of her own, I'd have been homeless or living on some generous person's couch sometime around September. I had some lucky breaks along the way (thank you, Utpal and Michael!) and just this morning, I accepted a full-time offer that came largely as a result of my obsessive open source work, dedication to not being shitty at things, and a whole lot of luck. This whole rags-to-something-better-than-rags story will make a better post sometime; for now, the point is that I feel as though it was all worth it because I no longer feel like I'm treading water in an industry that doesn't really have a future for me.

That was the good. It was a banner year, one I'll remember as a massive turning point thanks to the new opportunities and irons on the fire as we enter 2015. But if it was to sit on a scale, if I heaped in every single positive event, big and small, every tiny victory and massive conquest, and condensed it into something tangible, I don't think it could outweigh the single moment of devastation that occurred on January 29, 2014: my mom died of cancer. It crept up on us barely 8 months after it reappeared from 15 years of remission. Melanoma. She went into the hospital with stomach pain one night and was gone the next.

I haven't really written much about it and other than a post on Facebook and some time off of work and I don't think I've even typed it out in months. Seeing it on the screen still kind of feels like a shock. Things changed immediately after it happened: I couldn't handle life in the office, I couldn't deal with other people's schedules or attitudes — hell, I just couldn't deal with other people. A lot of my behavior since then — the decision to switch fields and work by myself from home, the unblinking focus on code, the freezing of every music project, silence on so many public tragedies that normally would have found me engaging in debate — I wonder how much of it was influenced by this. So much of this year was spent trying to process what happened. When the smoke cleared enough for me to see the other side, I think my priorities had changed. I found myself wanting to provide for my father, in whose household my mom was always CEO. I'm so much less interested in drama and dealing with personalities, which made me unwilling to pursue recording bands or playing shows or arguing politics or social issues. I'm filled with regret for things I never said or did. I like to think that I'm more careful with words, more deliberate with actions.

Even now, the world is darker, dirtier. It's as if everything is just slightly out of tune and I feel that dissonance all around me, subtle and unnerving; a constant, creeping vibration, profoundly wrong on a visceral level. For months, I kept waiting for my phone to ring and for someone to say, "Chris, we made a mistake! She's here, she's doing great!" Like a superhero who refuses to stay dead, cause nobody really stays dead, right?

No, the world doesn't work like that, and this is a part of life that every child eventually has to deal with. It's just frustrating that it should happen this year. I feel robbed of the opportunity to show her how things are working out, that her unflinching support and confidence for nearly 30 years wasn't misplaced. It's an incomprehensible feeling, to be so angry an existence itself but not really having anyone or anything specific to blame.

I try to reserve my blog for helpful things, how-tos and records of triumph, or at least cool things I come across as I go, but it didn't seem right to let this year close out without documenting 2014's twisting river of successful and failure. I don't mean to reduce the loss of my mother to some sort of apologue, but if I had to try and explain why I wanted to present this publicly, it would be to make a statement about the interconnectedness of all things. More than ever before, I am aware that we are all products of innumerable people's decisions and actions, nature's amorality, random coincidences, good and bad timing, and a whole lot of generous people. No matter how hard we work at things, we can take a step back and think about what led up to the opportunities, taken and missed, that shape our lives. Hard work is important, but so is awareness of the influence of everyone and everything around us; more importantly, we should take inventory of how cruelly fate could work out, how much worse things could always be.

I think of all the ways it could have been worse, of kids robbed of their parents as children, or kids who never know their parents, or kids who know their parents and hate them or are hated by them. My mom would tell me to think back on this year and be proud of my accomplishments, look after my father, love my friends and girlfriend, and do everything to the best of my abilities. She'd tell me to focus not on loss, but on success, the future, and the things I do have instead of the things I don't. It's a process, I guess, one I've never been very good at, but I'm doing my best, and I guess that's all anyone can really ask for.