Trigger Warning: Pregnancy Loss / Miscarriage
There is something to be said about carrying dead things inside you.
Dead dreams. Dead ambitions. Versions of ourselves that no longer exist. Futures we imagined so vividly that we struggle to accept when they are no longer possible.
And sometimes, quite literally, a life that has ended before we’ve had the chance to meet it.
Last year, I left Microsoft.
In the months leading up to my departure, I had been exploring a transition to the Life Sciences team. I saw enormous potential for AI to transform healthcare, and I wanted to be part of that work.
But alas, it wasn’t to be.
The end of my journey at Microsoft was bittersweet, but also a blessing. For the first time in a long time, I had breathing room to really think about what was next for me.
And the answer, at least at that moment, was my family.
As a Black woman, and particularly as a first-generation Haitian American, I grew up with the mentality that academics and career came first. Achievement mattered. Professional success mattered. Building something of yourself mattered.
And for a long time, that worked for me.
Until I became a mother.
There was something about giving birth to my son that fundamentally shifted what fulfillment looked like for me. The things I had spent so much of my life chasing professionally no longer brought me nearly the same level of joy.
So when I left Microsoft, I felt an unexpected sense of relief.
I was excited to spend more time with my son, to focus on growing our family, and to do so without the constant stress and anxiety of performing in the corporate world.
Not long afterward, we found out I was pregnant.
We were delighted.
I was excited to embark on my second pregnancy journey, imagining what life would look like with another little one in our home.
What I didn’t know was that the very thing bringing me so much joy would soon become the source of profound sorrow.
I remember hearing the ultrasound technician tell me she couldn’t find a heartbeat.
That it looked like our baby had passed, perhaps earlier that day or the night before.
And just like that, the future I had been imagining was gone.
Except my body hadn’t caught up to that reality.
I was carrying something dead inside me.
Something that, no matter how desperately I hoped or wished, wasn’t going to spring back to life.
And I had to figure out how long I was willing to carry it before I was ready to let go.
There is a particular kind of grief in knowing something has ended while still physically carrying the evidence of what could have been.
You know it’s over. You understand that intellectually. But accepting it is something entirely different.
You find yourself holding on to the smallest possibility that somehow, someway, things might change.
And eventually, you have to make peace with the fact that they won’t.
You have to give yourself permission to release what you’ve lost, even when every part of you wishes the story had ended differently.
I know it might sound strange to draw a connection between pregnancy loss and a career in technology.
I’m certainly not suggesting they’re equivalent experiences.
But going through that loss made me think differently about the other things we carry long after they’ve stopped being what they once were.
The careers we nurtured. The identities we built. The dreams we invested years of our lives into.
For so many people, particularly Black women who were raised to see education and professional achievement as pathways to security and opportunity, our careers become deeply intertwined with who we believe ourselves to be.
And then the market shifts.
The industry changes.
AI enters the conversation, and suddenly the skills, roles, and professional trajectories we spent years cultivating feel uncertain.
For some, that uncertainty comes in the form of a layoff. For others, it’s the slow realization that the career they once loved no longer brings them the same sense of purpose.
And we hold on.
Sometimes because we’ve invested too much to imagine walking away.
Sometimes because we don’t know who we are without it.
And sometimes because letting go feels too much like admitting defeat.
But what if letting go isn’t defeat?
What if it’s simply acknowledging that something has run its course, and giving yourself permission to live beyond it?
After my pregnancy loss, my partner and I spent months trying to conceive again.
I was feverishly desperate to get pregnant.
What had initially been a source of excitement and connection gradually became a source of stress. My desperation was beginning to negatively affect our relationship.
And one day, I just said, forget it.
Not because I stopped wanting another baby.
I still wanted that future desperately.
But I was tired of allowing the pursuit of it to consume the life I was already living.
I decided I was going to live in the moment. Spend time with the people I loved. Do the things that brought me joy.
And if I got pregnant again, so be it.
I wasn’t giving up on the dream.
I was giving myself permission to stop putting my life on hold while waiting for it.
And something interesting happened in that process.
I started finding my way back to another part of myself that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.
The technologist.
Not the employee. Not the person chasing performance goals or trying to position herself for the next promotion.
The person who genuinely loves technology.
Who loves thinking deeply about problems, imagining possible solutions, experimenting, building things, breaking things, and figuring out how to make them work.
Technology has always been one of the ways I express myself creatively.
And somewhere in the humdrum of corporate performance cycles and navigating a shifting professional landscape, I had lost some of that spark.
So I started building again.
I threw myself back into community work. I explored ideas and opportunities in AI. I experimented with tools, workflows, and projects that interested me.
I wasn’t always sure where any of it was going.
Sometimes I was floundering.
But I was learning. And the more I experimented, failed, adjusted, and tried again, the faster I seemed to learn.
More importantly, I was having fun.
I was falling back in love with technology on my own terms.
I stopped waiting for the workforce to give me permission to build or be on the cutting edge.
I was going to do it whether I was on a W-2 or not.
And it was around the time I started seriously considering a return to the corporate workforce that I discovered I was pregnant again.
Initially, I thought I’d created a quagmire for myself.
How exactly was I going to return to the workforce while pregnant, especially in what everyone kept describing as an incredibly difficult labor market?
The timing certainly wasn’t what I would have planned.
But I kept doing what has served me well throughout my career.
I leaned into community.
I kept building.
I kept learning.
And I kept pursuing the work that genuinely excited me, regardless of whether someone was paying me to do it.
I began seeing what felt like blue open spaces in this AI-driven economy. Opportunities to experiment, contribute, and create things that hadn’t been possible just a few years earlier.
And I didn’t need to wait for someone to hire me to start exploring them.
Eventually, an opportunity came along that brought several parts of my life together in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
I’ve now started a new role at a healthcare system right in my backyard.
An industry I had wanted to transition into before leaving Microsoft.
A workplace where I can be more connected to my local community, work alongside colleagues I can actually see and interact with in real time, and explore meaningful opportunities at the intersection of technology and healthcare.
And perhaps most importantly, a role where who I am from 9 to 5 doesn’t have to be in conflict with who I am from 5 to 9.
I’m a mother. A technologist. A community builder. A creative. Someone who loves experimenting with ideas and bringing them to life.
I don’t want to have to abandon one part of myself to make room for another.
And for the first time in a while, I feel like I’m finding a way to bring those parts of myself together.
None of this happened according to plan.
I didn’t leave Microsoft knowing exactly where I’d end up.
I didn’t anticipate losing a pregnancy.
I certainly didn’t anticipate navigating another pregnancy while trying to reenter the workforce.
And I didn’t have some perfectly executed strategy that led me to where I am today.
I simply kept trying to find my way back to the things that brought me joy.
And along the way, I learned that sometimes the hardest part of moving forward isn’t figuring out what comes next.
It’s giving yourself permission to release what came before.
To stop carrying the version of your life you thought you were supposed to have.
To stop measuring your present against a future that no longer exists.
To accept that something can have mattered deeply, can have been loved deeply, can have shaped who you are, and still be something you have to let go of.
Earlier this year, I would have been welcoming the baby we lost.
Instead, I’m preparing to welcome my second-born toward the end of this year, just in time for Thanksgiving.
And come January 2027, I’m looking forward to diving deeper into a new role, on a new team, in an industry I’ve wanted to be part of for some time.
So much life has been lived in such a short period of time.
So much has been lost. So much has changed. And there is still so much more life to live.
I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. Some losses are simply losses, and I don’t need to find a silver lining in them to acknowledge how they’ve changed me.
But I do believe we can give ourselves permission to live again, even when the life we’re living looks nothing like the one we imagined.
There is something to be said about the dead things we carry.
Sometimes, letting them go is what reminds us that we are still living.
And that there is still so much life left to live.