Falling back and building back up

In 2017 I was determined to leave IT finance; I had enough of Banking and Mortgage, so I took a nice long break spent time w/ the family and our new one year old. And found my dream job; I mean literally after interviewing I had literal dreams of working there; walking on the bluffs and solving complex software quality engineering problems, (don't judge my dreams). 

Over the course of 2018 my commute was over an hour long even with a few speeding tickets, BUT it was worth it. I loaded up every leadership book I could listen too and bought in hook line and sinker to my new gig's philosophy went from 1990's on premise infrastructure  all .NET with Test Professional, Selenium web driver/C# and MS Office to AWS, ruby, Cyprus, jira, confluence and Google office. The rate of learning, lack of sleep and stress had my my skin break out in eczema that a still have today, i had put on weight, even though we had on-site yoga and gyms w/ my commute I would sacrifice the work out to see the family, I knew I had just a year to do this before we could find a place closer and move, which the awesome company I worked for was paying for. 

By the start of 2020 we moved into our new place w/  my commute 20 minutes away and my wife working from home we were set to crush the next 5 to 10 years; until the pandemic and getting laid off. My first week to work and was meeting w/ our new VP of Data when we got the news that we've all be working remote till this pandemic blew over.  And by July we could see the writing on the wall engineering pivoted to an SDET model and 80% of QA was let go including myself. 

And of course no one likes being let go in the middle of a pandemic but I took my severance, my stocks and got another gig BACK in mortgage and Finance without missing a day of work  or change in salary. 

A year later 2021, and I'm CRUSHING what I do but back in an industry that I could barely wake up too and head to WORK just a few years earlier and a pandemic later.