Where Things Stand (And Where They're Going)
Not done. Not even close. That's fine.
Part 6 of an ongoing series. Start from Part 1 here.
A year ago, June 2025, the MacBook Air arrived and everything felt alien.
Here's what a year looks like: three certifications passed. Hundreds of hours on TryHackMe, ACI Learning, Professor Messer, OverTheWire. An Obsidian vault that has become something like a second brain. A desk with a Rubber Ducky, a WiFi Pineapple Pager, and a ZeroTrace OSINT device on it. 2600 and PHRACK back in the magazine rack. A shelf of NoStarch Press books stacked in a way that would make a certain type of person very nervous about me.
I haven't landed a job yet.
I want to say that plainly, because this series wouldn't be honest if I left it out. The journey from "Creative Director who used to hack on a C64" to "employed SOC Analyst" isn't a straight line with a clean destination at the end of it. It's a grind. A good grind — I wake up every morning and I want to do this work — but a grind.
Masterschool is ongoing for a bit. The TryHackMe SOC Level 1 path is deeper than I expected when I started it, in the best possible way. There's a capstone network design project — for a fictional digital agency — that's required me to think about security architecture in a way that purely lab-based learning never forces. Design a network from the ground up. Defend it. Know why every decision was the right one, or know what an attacker will find if it wasn't.
That's close to real work. That's the closest I've been.
The imposter syndrome is still here.
I want to be clear about that, because people who write about career transitions have a tendency to retroactively tidy up their doubts once they're on the other side. I'm not on the other side. I'm in the middle of it.
Some days the gap between where I am and where I want to be feels enormous. Some days I triage a lab alert and think: yes — I know what this is, I know what to do with it, I know why it matters. Both of those days are real. Both of those days are part of the same story.
The thing I keep coming back to: before I doubt any situation or anyone else, I always doubt myself first. I look inward before I look outward. I ask what I could be doing better before I ask what's wrong with the setup. That's not self-punishment — that's how I improve. It's the only thing I've ever known how to do.
So where does this go from here?
More learning. The SOC Level 1 path on TryHackMe. More hands-on time with the tools on my desk. Eventually: job applications, interviews, the real test of whether everything I've been building holds up in the room.
I started this because getting kicked out of a bad agency gave me no more excuses to defer the thing I actually wanted to do. I started this because the C64 kid never really stopped wanting to take systems apart — he just spent three decades doing it with briefs and campaigns instead of terminals and packets.
The comeback isn't finished.
That's the point.
I'll keep writing.
