For me, 2025 was a year in transition. Almost every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, but at the same time contains incredible potential for a happy ending.
Just a heads up to skip this read if you’re not in the headspace for discussions or mentions of mental illness, serious health issues, and intergenerational trauma/family violence.
1. The Finite
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
I’ve told this story in a lot of different ways. These days, I often focus on how I stumbled into my passion and obsession with data and made a bet that what was an emergent field at the time would be the future. That’s a much funner version to tell, it glosses over a lot of anxiety, depression, insecurity, and undiagnosed ADHD/ASD.
Around 2017, I heard about a pilot program at NRCan called the Canada’s Free Agents. It was a tiny group of highly mobile public servants who were in charge of their own careers and worked on short term innovative projects. I was in my last year of university and in my third year as an FSWEP student. I had spent almost the majority of my time in university working on the same project team. I also spent the majority of my time using work to avoid the fact that I was struggling.
Oh well, I thought, by the skin of my teeth, I’ll get the degree I need to keep the job I already have. Even if I wasn’t sure if I really liked my job.
It was an incredibly emotional file, but it was also highly demanding and a high priority one. The whole team had been rotating through burnout for months, years. It was a transition period for that project.
After years of extensions, we finally reached a major milestone. It was time to transition from being a time bound project to implement a legal settlement, back to regular business.
It was the start of a bit of a quarter life crisis. It was all I had ever known and at the same time, I couldn’t fathom spending my life working on “regular business”. But I started to think maybe I didn’t have any real skills, I just was good at doing this job.
It was admidst those fears of stagnation and change that the Free Agents Program became a north star.
The next few years I spent building up my skills, moving from a decent writer that scraped a bachelor’s degree to a data analyst. In retrospect, the more important actual goal was believing in myself, my skills, and my thinking.
Being able to put yourself out there, hustling for new assignments, communicating your value, and building a network is the key for mapping out the type of careers where you do what fulfills you most - not just when you are responsible for finding a funding source for your own position. In building up those skills, by the time I was successful in the recruitment process, I actually wondered if I would benefit from joining the program. I was such a different person from when I originally set the goal in 2017 and was already moving around to form my own assignments.
The postmortem for the program has been turning over in my head over the last year. It resurfaced in the last few week as NRCan, the last standing cohort, received their workforce adjustment letter. The official, official end.
Here’s where I landed…
A program like this only works when not only everyone who is part of it wants it to work, but everyone who is part of it understands that being a Free Agent was never meant to be the end state. The end state would have been an fundamental change in how we think about labour, talent, and autonomy and freedom. We would have needed to imagine public servants not as a replaceable cogs, but as capable experts who should be deployed where they can have the highest impact with the pay and recognition that matches that.
We would have needed a public service that truly put mission first.
In some ways, I think the writing was on the wall the moment the program started growing and started being institutionalized. When something is borne in protest of a system, it has a small window to transform things before it gets dismantled for parts and swallowed by it.
But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing or that it didn’t make a difference. It also is never the end.
“In physics, the observer effect is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation.” - [Observer effect (physics) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)
I think about the observer effect a lot. Yes, how it prevents truly objective measures, but more saliently, what it means about the effect even the smallest particles have on outcomes. Sometimes the mere existence or presence of something can shift the universe around it. Even if it was imperceptible, it can fundamentally change how we understand the nature of things.
We were here. The work we did mattered. But we were always more than the sum of our parts.
Accepting the deployment offer has certainly sent my life into chaos for the last year and I still need to secure a new permanent position by Feb 2027 to stay in the public service.
I don’t regret that decision.
2. The Unknown
“Because when you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worth while.” - Anne of Green Gable, L.M. Montgomery
It’s in the air, the not knowing. The long tail of the economic impacts of pandemic shutdowns are being felt, fiscal restraint is the word of the day (week, month, year). It is bringing out the best and worst in everyone.
When I first got the letter communicating that my position would be elimated, I seriously considered it. It was pride. I never want to be somewhere that I’m not wanted. I considered making the best of this situation to go back to school for an Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS). I had been sitting with the regret of how my undergraduate degree went for some time now. It could be my second chance.
On the other hand, I had already lost the Free Agent program. A program which has been such a huge part of my identity, even before I was officially an agent. Was I ready to give up being a public servant?
I joined the government to serve Canadians. While the last year has been incredibly stressful with the lack of opportunities as I tried to find a new role to avoid being WFA’d, it has also been an incredibly fulfilling one. I worked on an assignment at the Canada School of Public Service where I worked on connecting the data community across the GC. I started nurturing the little spark that is an ontological/rules as code approach to transforming policymaking.
And more practically, I am the sole income earner my little family, supporting my disabled spouse who can’t work.
So the decision was pretty obvious, I needed to stay.
Whatever that means. I think of myself as someone does The Things while being scared and anxious. Because I’m very much scared and anxious every moment of the day so I would do very little if didn’t. Even though this decision was obvious in the end, I felt like I was taking the option with the least unknown. It felt kind of wrong to choose the thing that scared me the least.
Our brains are weird. Mine has gotten too comfortable with chaos.
I joined the government back in 2014, shortly after the last major round of workforce adjustments. People were fearful, competitive, and constantly looking over one another’s shoulders. We walked on eggshells around people who would blow up from innocuous situations. Looking back, I realized I had joined a traumatized workplace.
Choosing to stay in the government, compared to when I initially joined government, is to do so understanding how it is.
The truth is I have been truly disillusioned by leadership in the public service.
For a long time, I never said out loud that I was aspiring to leadership because it felt very vulnerable. Like saying that I somehow bragging or worried that people would judge me to be insufficient if they heard it. But secretly, I wanted it.
I always wanted a big life. I wanted to feel like I was in control. I wanted to have power to make a difference. I wanted the ability to shape the vision. I especially wanted to be able to shape the vision instead of working hard to cobble together something to implement a lack of vision or a bad one.
I’m now acting as an IT advisor, one level below an IT manager. I am not someone who could be satisfied for the rest of my life staying at level. In fact, I tried very hard to stay at the analyst level, but I always ended up doing The Most and getting assigned more responsibility than I was getting paid for anyways. I could delay a few more years, but eventually I did need to answer (or not) the call to leadership.
This is a pretty stupid story, but it summarizes my disillusionment. I was in a Teams meeting with someone, discussing the culture of Executives in the public service and the lack of incentive for strategic long term (10 years +) planning driven by evidence. I put into the chat a joke, “I would spend less money on therapy if the executives went to therapy”. The meeting invite included some folks that were not present in the call. My comment was raised to my manager by an executive who saw the message to address with me for “insubordination” because the person thought I was talking about them. The person who raised it was someone I thought I had a good relationship with. They didn’t even talk to me about it directly. We had had a friendly chat full of jokes earlier that day.
It put a lot of things about my relationship to ambition, promotion, and power into perspective. It made the path much clearer. I want to put my energy into into deepening my knowledge, creating new knowledge, and connecting people to the knowledge that they need.
And in that clarity, I planted 2 seeds that I hope sprout in 2026.
First, I applied for the Governor General’s Leadership Conference and made it to the interview stage. It’s a 14 day program with 3 days of plenary, 10 days of traveling across a province or territory, ending with a presentation to the Governor General about what we saw and learned about our country. I still don’t have a response for whether I am accepted or not. I feel like it may be a no. It was the first context in which I had to articulate what I could offer as a leader; I’ve been thinking about all of the things I wish I had said ever since.
Second, I submitted my application for the part-time MLIS program. Although it didn’t fit into the timeline of the workforce adjustment education allowance, it was something I’ve wanted for a long time. I want to bring together the 2 disciplines that I’ve been bridging in an ad hoc way just to get things done in the government. I want it to be systematic, disciplined, repeatable, and measurable. I want for all of the tacit knowledge that exists in the experts in the data and information community to be documented and acknowledged. I want my toiling away in bureaucratic systems to not be at the whims of the highest paid or ranked person in the room, but to contribute to our body of knowledge. With this second chance, I would work like hell to make sure that at the end of it, I had the option to apply for a PhD in Public Policy.
3. The Unexpected
“Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.” - Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
With the decision made to stay in the public service, I still needed to figure out what exactly I was doing. At the end of October, I needed to end my assignment with the CSPS a bit early. An opportunity popped up initially just to fill my time with “meaningful work” as I returned to TBS. Within a few weeks, it morphed into being the Data Lead for the Open Government Portal. It’s a new role that I am helping to shape, so there’s every chance it could fall through. As this role is includes an acting at the IT-03 level until the end of fiscal with the potential of permanency in some form. I do have some other things in the works if things don’t pan out, but you know with the last year… this is as close as it’s gotten. It’s not actually a job that I even had on my radar, but ended up being exactly the type of job I do love - at the intersection of operations, IT, policy, and relationship/community.
So I maybe kind of buried the lead a bit about the real tough things about this year. Honestly, the WFA stuff is maybe bottom of the list in terms of things I’m worried about, expecially with the unexpected, but exciting opportunity that has popped up now. It’s easier to talk about the thing I have control over.
My 80 year old grandmother was diagnosed with oral cancer a few weeks ago and immediately underwent and survived a 6 hour surgery on her neck and throat area. She’s doing well now. I’m glad and I hope she lives many more years. That might sound a bit bland… because it is. She use to beat the ever loving shit out of my dad as a kid and now spends most of her time screaming obscenities at the TV about anyone who doesn’t fit her understanding of the world. I don’t think she’s had a real conversation with anyone for decades. What do you say when someone in your life in this way is sick?
The only thing I can think to say is … disability and health, it’s not about good or bad or deserving or undeserving. It’s part of life. Anything can happen at anybody at anytime. A caring society takes care of everyone as they are, not as we wish they could be. My partner and I have both had COVID-19 exactly twice, Zan got Long Covid and I did not. We got exceptionally lucky that we had long agreed for Zan to be a house spouse, but now with reduced capacity.
The full version of this story is a wild and frustrating ride through the Ontario Healthcare system that I might talk about another time through the lens of Service Design. Also, disclaimer: I am not a doctor so please don’t take my word for any medical stuff and consult your doctor.
The short version: I’ve known my whole life that I have the gene for Hemophilia A. My maternal uncle has a severe form of the disorder. I had been tested in Taiwan, but I never saw the paperwork. I never had reason to get it confirmed until this year because I’ve never been symptomatic.
Important parenthesis: A common misconception about people with XX chromosomes is that they can only be carriers of Hemophilia, but this is actually not true. Humans only need >20% of the missing factor to clot normally. When one X chromosome has the hemophilia gene, the second chromosome X can completely override the missing gene or reduce its effect to only a mild form. However, this creates risks because those with milder forms of hemophilia may not even know they have it until they have a major bleed, such as with surgery or childbirth.
We were really hoping to start a family this year, but it hasn’t happened yet.
In preparation, I was referred to a hemophilia clinic and unexpectedly, they told me I didn’t have Hemophilia and I had no chance of passing it on. I asked them if they were sure… a lot of times. Then 1.5 months later, they called me back in urgently. They very sheepishly told me that they had based the previous information they told me on the preliminary results. When the full results came in, they… well probably wished they were wearing their brown pants. According to the doctor, he had never seen a case where the preliminary results was insufficient for diagnosis.
I do actually have hemophilia A. Like I said, I am asymptomatic, but I have the gene. However, because my family history is of a severe hemophilia (<1% of factor), if I had a child with XY chromosomes they would have 50% chance of having no hemophilia or severe hemophilia, XX would be 50% of chance of no hemophilia or mild to asymptomatic hemophilia.
I had already done a lot of research around Hemophilia over the years so I had already done a lot of processing. Zan and I have already had the conversations about it before we started trying. The real reason this has been weighing on me, the thing I have been worried about all along is my mother.
My maternal uncle was a mischievous child who got into plenty of normal child hijinx. Normal childhood hijinx that would end with a desparate race keep him alive until they got to the emergency room. Although her father had a well paying job, they did not have Universal Healthcare in Taiwan until 1995 (the year I was born). As well the treatments at the time used blood products which turned out to carry the risk of Hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS.
My mother’s childhood was incredibly turbulent and violent.In that pressure cooker of financial stress and keeping a kid from dying, my grandparents fought constantly and sometimes escalated physically. A lot of opportunities my mother saw her peers have, she did not. There was never any money left for her. Her lifelong dream is still to learn how to play the piano. My mother had to be hyper-independent. She left the house as early as she possibly could. She escaped first with school, then part-time jobs. She met my father through my grandparents; she had worked for them after school for many years. When she was 21, they got married and I was born a year later. Although she loved us hard, she was so young and never had healthy relationships modeled for her. Today, she constantly asks my brother and I about how often we fight with partners. She’s been absolutely flummoxed at us answering that we usually talk things out quietly.
Hemophilia A is quite treatable these days. There are better treatments coming out all the time. Generally, it’s managed at home with weekly subcutaneous injections to keep levels above the 20% for the bleeding cascade to work properly. For kids that might play sports, even contact sport, they can do IV therapy to bring levels up to 100%, which means it’s the same risk as a kid without hemophilia.
I asked the nurse not to curse me with a football loving child. I really don’t understand football.
Given that I have a significant chance of a child with severe hemophilia, one of the options I would have is genetic screening. Although I nor Zan have any interest in selecting (hot take: Eugenics is bad!), I took advantage of the situation to get an earlier referral to the fertility clinic. I don’t think I can continue in this cycle of hope and disappointment for much longer so I’ll still have the conversation if it gets us to fertility treatment faster… In Ontario, everyone under 43 years of age is covered for 1 round of IVF at a funded clinic, but the clinic requires a referral from your family doctor who usually ask if it’s been over a year without success and has a long wait list.
4. The Cogent
“900 Years Of Time And Space And I’ve Never Met Someone Who Wasn’t Important.” - The 11th Doctor, Doctor Who
Looking back on the year, the through-line is relationships. I called this section Cogent because it’s something that has come up time after time and yet is always proven to be accurate. That it’s the community, the connections, the friends we made along the way that is important. No matter how cool or interesting a thing is that you’re doing, if you do it by being an asshole to others, it’s kind of worthless. I’m grateful for the Civics Bootcamp I took with Synapcity - Ottawa’s Community of Citymakers which gave me the frameworks and language for it.
This has actually inspired an entirely new system of organization for my Personal Knowledge Management System in Obsidian.md. I had tried all sorts of systems for tagging and sorting and cataloguing my writing and notes. Although it was always about building connected notes, none of it ever stuck because it was not intuitive. I realized that I don’t think of a subject when I’m trying to recall something, I think of the person I was talking to about it, or the place where I learned it, or the thing that inspired a rabbit hole. It finally clicked in and I’ve actually been using Obsidian daily now.
To end on a hopeful note, I volunteered for Forum for Young Canadian’s National Summit back in March of this year as a group leader. I supported a group of 10 youth through a week of learning on civic engagement and democracy in Ottawa. Without sharing the private moments and connections I had with the youth, what I wrote at the end of the week remains true: “Particularly those who felt out of place because of the intersecting identities you bring with you: I see you, I’m proud of you, thank you for taking up the space you DESERVE. I can’t wait to see what you do next.”