A story about how one small moment shaped a life of curiosity and courage.
I turned 39 this year, and life feels like a strange collage: everything I once dreamed of, but nothing like I imagined. I’ve built a life I’m proud of, in a country I once couldn’t have found on a map, doing work I never knew was possible for me — a career in tech that started, strangely enough, with a 1990s movie and my dad cheering from the couch. Still, I’ve been feeling nostalgic. I miss home, childhood, and the version of my dad who watched Hackers with me in 1996.
Maybe my dad didn’t predict my future. Maybe he programmed it.
The Weight of Now
Lately, reflection keeps sneaking up on me. I think about family, the future, and that ticking reminder that life isn’t waiting for me to get my shit together.
Retirement planning (gag). Ageing parents (sob). Career pivots that lead back to the same questions: What’s next? What do I want? Who am I building this for?
I miss the small rituals of home, the quiet Sundays, and the people who still called me “Nitchie.” Mostly, I’ve been thinking about my dad. About how complicated our relationship has become. Years of distance, mismatched values, and silences that stretched too long. Yet underneath all that, there’s this stubborn hope that we might rebuild something before time runs out.
Because as I age, so does he. And I don’t want to carry the weight of unfinished conversations forever. A story about how one small moment shaped a life of curiosity and courage.
Back to 1996
Grief and reflection have a way of pulling you back to small, ordinary moments that turn out to be pivotal. For me, it’s often 1996.
My grandmother’s living room. A weekend movie rental: Hackers.
If you weren’t around in the ’90s, let me set the scene. The internet still made that screeching dial-up sound. Monitors were the size of microwaves. Angelina Jolie was a cyber rebel on rollerblades.
My dad loved anything sci-fi. He was unknowingly raising a closeted sci-fi cult nerd who adored Star Trek and any film where someone pressed a glowing button to save humanity. We’d already watched Terminator, Species, and Judge Dredd more times than anyone should.
But Hackers hit differently. When Jolie’s character, Kate, pulled off some impossible coding stunt, he pointed at the TV, eyes bright, and shouted: “You see that? You see how good she is with computers? My Nitchie’s going to be like that!”
I remember this moment, like time paused for a beat. The popcorn bowl was half-empty, the room smelled like dust and butter, and my dad was looking at me as if he’d just seen the future.
I laughed, a little embarrassed. I was maybe nine or ten. I didn’t even know what “coding” meant. I just knew that it looked powerful. That it was cool. That my dad thought I could do it.
Maybe it was Prophecy. Maybe it was Programming.
Over the years, that moment faded into memory. But somewhere, deep down, it stuck.
Maybe he saw it in me first: the curiosity, the rebellion, the constant need to understand how things worked. Or maybe, by saying it out loud, he planted it, a quiet instruction that would run in the background for decades, like a program waiting for the right command.
Either way, here I am. In tech. In education. Building digital systems. Studying computer science again, because apparently, my story arc has no interest in simplicity. Sometimes I think the universe has a twisted sense of humour.
Full Circle Moments
This year, I enrolled in two programs: one to finally complete my long-neglected Computer Science degree, and another postgraduate course bridging technology and education.
It’s exhausting and rewarding in equal measure. At 2 a.m., buried in assignments, I sometimes question my life choices. But it feels right.
Every new concept reminds me of that moment in my grandmother’s living room, of my dad’s voice saying, “You’ll be like that someday.” He couldn’t have known what he was setting in motion. He just saw a spark and named it. Maybe that’s the quiet power of being seen. Sometimes it takes one sentence to reprogram the way you see yourself.
The Complicated Parts
Of course, not everything between us stayed simple. Life happened. Distance and disappointment crept in. We lost each other for a while. But as he gets older, I feel that pull to reconnect. To rewrite the code, so to speak.
There’s a tenderness in middle age that no one warns you about. You start to see your parents not as giants or villains, but as flawed, frightened humans doing their best with the tools they had.
I don’t know if he remembers that afternoon. But I do. And part of healing, I think, is giving credit where it’s due. Even if love wasn’t perfect, it was present.
Even if it didn’t sound like “I’m proud of you,” sometimes it sounded like “My Nitchie’s going to be like that.” It took me years to understand that both meant the same thing in his language.
Sometimes love doesn’t come with closure. It just changes shape. You learn to hold the story differently, not as proof of what was missing but as evidence that something real existed. The ache doesn’t disappear; it just becomes gentler, less about blame and more about understanding. Maybe that’s what growing up really is: learning to love your parents for who they were, not who you needed them to be. I think about that a lot.
The Takeaway
When I trace it back, nearly every dream I’ve chased, from travel to tech to teaching, connects to that spark, though it took decades to see it.
I wanted to be like those women on screen: Ripley (Alien), Scully (X-Files), Leeloo (Fifth Element), Uhura (Star Trek), Janeway (ST: Voyager), Sam Carter (SG-1), Zoe Washburne (Firefly), and of course, Kate (Hackers). Capable. Curious. Bold. Brave. And somehow, I became that, even if it looks less like a sci-fi movie and more like Google Sheets. Still, it’s mine. I am a woman in tech.
I think about that often. How much of who we become is shaped by the people who name our potential before we can see it ourselves. Words can plant faith or fear; I’ve carried both.
One offhand comment can become the seed of an entire life. Maybe my dad didn’t predict my future. Maybe he programmed it.
And as I sit here — 39, reflective, still rebellious — I realise he wasn’t just predicting a career. He was naming a calling. The dream became this: a life built on curiosity, courage, and a healthy disrespect for limits.
Not every word spoken over us becomes a blessing. But this one did.
If you’ve ever had someone unknowingly speak your future into existence, hold onto that. It might resurface years later as a career, a calling, or a quiet memory that reminds you who you are.
This is the first story in The Long Game — a series about how small moments can shape entire lives. If you want to follow along, subscribe below. Because sometimes dreams don’t die. They just wait for you to grow into them.
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