From IT Manager to Author

Most authors have some romantic origin story about scribbling stories since childhood or always dreaming of seeing their name on a book cover. That’s not me. For most of my life, I was the IT guy—the person businesses called when systems crashed, not when they needed emotional insights.

My path to writing “The Inheritance of Patterns” was anything but straightforward. It was a desperate act of survival that somehow transformed into a mission.

The Technician vs. The Trauma

For decades, my career in information technology provided the perfect metaphor for how I handled my emotional life: troubleshoot, fix, optimize, repeat. Got a problem? Find a logical solution. Something broken? Identify the failure point and repair it.

This approach worked brilliantly for networks and software. For the unprocessed trauma I carried? Not so much.

Looking back, I can see how perfectly my IT career aligned with my adaptive patterns. The hypervigilance that made me constantly scan for threats? Excellent for identifying potential system failures before they became catastrophic. The emotional compartmentalization that kept painful feelings safely contained? Perfect for staying logical under pressure when systems crashed.

My focus on performance over presence? Ideal for an industry that rewards results regardless of the personal cost to achieve them.

I wasn’t just good at IT—I was good at it precisely because of my trauma adaptations.

The Breakdown That Became a Breakthrough

Everything changed when my marriage imploded on my 50th birthday. The discovery of my wife’s affair didn’t just end a relationship—it shattered the carefully constructed identity I’d built around being the competent problem-solver, the guy who could fix anything.

This wasn’t a system failure I could troubleshoot. No amount of logical analysis could repair this breach. For perhaps the first time in my adult life, I faced a situation where my adaptive strategies not only failed but actively made things worse.

The suicidal thoughts that followed weren’t just about losing my marriage. They represented the complete collapse of my operational system—the realization that the strategies I’d relied on my entire life couldn’t navigate this level of emotional devastation.

From Technical Documentation to Emotional Exploration

In the depths of this crisis, writing became my lifeline—not because I aspired to authorship, but because I literally didn’t know how else to process what was happening. As an IT professional, I’d spent years creating technical documentation. Now I found myself documenting my own internal system failures with the same meticulous attention to detail.

The first pieces I wrote weren’t chapters or essays—they were more like incident reports. What happened? What was the impact? What were the observable symptoms? When had the problem first appeared?

This approach—treating my emotional breakdown with the same analytical rigor I’d apply to a network outage—created enough distance for me to stay engaged with unbearable feelings. It was documentation as dissociation, analysis as survival.

The Pivot Point

The transformation from private journaling to potential book began with a seemingly casual comment from my therapist. After reading a particularly detailed account of my childhood hypervigilance, she said, “You know, the way you write about these experiences… it’s different. You bridge the technical precision with emotional truth in a way I rarely see.”

I dismissed her observation. “I’m just processing. This isn’t ‘writing’ writing.”

“What if it could be both?” she asked. “What if the same precision that made you effective in IT could make you effective in helping others understand their own patterns?”

That question planted a seed that would take months to germinate. I continued writing, still primarily for my own healing, but with a growing awareness that these words might eventually reach beyond my private journals.

The Technician’s Approach to Trauma Writing

As I moved from journaling to more structured writing, I realized my technical background had given me tools that proved unexpectedly valuable for this radically different task:

1. Systems thinking: The ability to see how individual components connect to create larger patterns
2. Root cause analysis: Looking beyond symptoms to identify underlying drivers
3. Documentation discipline: Capturing observations with precision and clarity
4. Implementation protocols: Translating concepts into actionable steps
5. Iterative improvement: Constantly refining based on new information

These approaches—so familiar from my IT work—became the foundation for how I structured “The Inheritance of Patterns.” The book’s systematic progression from understanding to implementation isn’t accidental; it reflects decades of professional experience in troubleshooting complex systems.

The Identity Crisis

The shift from identifying as “an IT manager who writes” to “a writer” wasn’t smooth or simple. Even as the manuscript took shape, I struggled with questions of legitimacy and authenticity:

Who was I to write about trauma? I had no psychology degree, no clinical credentials.

What gave me the right to think my personal experiences merited a book?

Wasn’t this whole project just self-indulgent trauma dumping disguised as helping others?

These questions plagued me daily, sometimes paralyzing my writing progress for weeks at a time. The impostor syndrome was so intense that I seriously considered abandoning the entire project multiple times.

What kept me going wasn’t ambition or confidence—it was the responses I received when I tentatively shared fragments with others in recovery. Their recognition, their “yes, exactly this,” their relief at finding precise language for experiences they’d struggled to articulate—these became my compass when self-doubt threatened to derail the project.

The Technical Writer’s Voice

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this transition was finding an authentic voice. Technical writing prizes clarity and precision above all; emotional expression and personal perspective are actively discouraged. After decades of documentation that intentionally obscured the human behind the words, I had to learn to write as myself.

My early drafts reflected this struggle—clinical and detached when describing deeply personal experiences, then suddenly raw and unfiltered when explaining neurobiological concepts. I was writing as two separate people, neither of them fully authentic.

Finding integration between these voices—between the analytical precision of the IT professional and the emotional truth of the trauma survivor—took countless revisions and a willingness to be uncomfortable with my own words.

The voice you’ll find in “The Inheritance of Patterns” isn’t the polished result of years of creative writing practice. It’s the hard-won integration of seemingly contradictory aspects of myself—the technician and the human, the analyst and the survivor, the problem-solver and the still-healing child.

From Systems Manager to Pattern Mapper

I never set out to become an author. I certainly never planned to write a book exposing the most painful aspects of my life. But as I’ve moved through this unexpected transition, I’ve come to recognize that perhaps I’m not becoming something entirely new so much as applying existing skills to a different domain.

I’m still fundamentally a systems analyst—I’ve just turned that analytical lens from external networks to internal patterns. I’m still documenting workflows—just emotional rather than technical ones. I’m still creating implementation protocols—just for healing rather than troubleshooting.

The tools that made me effective in IT—precision, systematic thinking, clear communication—are the same ones that have shaped this book. They’re just being applied to the most complex system I’ve ever attempted to understand: the human response to developmental trauma.

In the end, perhaps the distance between the server room and the page isn’t as vast as it first appeared. Both require a willingness to look unflinchingly at what isn’t working, to trace failures to their source, and to implement changes with consistency and care.

If “The Inheritance of Patterns” helps even a handful of people recognize and understand their own adaptive patterns, then this unexpected career pivot will have been worth every uncomfortable moment of transition.

From IT manager to author wasn’t a path I ever planned to travel. But looking back now, I can see how every technical skill I developed was unconsciously preparing me to document the most complex system failure of all: the inheritance of trauma patterns that shape us without our knowledge or consent.