Fallback option was to help my best friend from school to build a tech startup. We lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic but we’d talked about this during my last few months at the biotech and we figured it’d work. It was being built with Ruby on Rails which I hadn’t touched - last time I did any web development was 6 years ago with LAMP - but I was excited to get back into tech and learn.
When I started working on this new startup, it went wrong very quickly. I was working from home and quickly felt isolated and sad. I noticed that my anxiety levels were shooting through the roof. I felt I wasn’t learning RoR anywhere near quickly enough to get to grips with our core business problem (which was to build a new search engine for technical staff). And since I was working with my friend, who had literally busted his arse for a year to raise funding for us, I felt utterly trapped. My head was telling me to get the hell out and take a long long break to destress. But that would totally wreck his business opportunity - his funding was contingent on having a tech team (me) ready to go immediately.
Eventually I did quit. I found myself utterly helpless and reliant on my wife’s income for the first time. I was now relegated to stay at home dad status, which I’d done everything to avoid as my career had always been important to me. That was rock bottom. In real terms it could have been much worse, but mentally that’s about as low and trapped as I’ve ever been, and I honestly didn’t think I’d ever find a way back into any meaningful career.
Long story short - I took a year out to spend with my kid. Wife got a one year transfer to London, which was an amazing blessing in disguise because it was a tonne of fun to explore the city with my kid. Finally inched back into tech, did two boot camps, rediscovered my love of coding, got a job, and gradually got back on track. It’s taken 5 years and is in many ways an ongoing process, but I did manage to get out of that trapped situation.