This is uncomfortable
I gave up my music career, sold my instruments, and enrolled in a coding bootcamp. Am I in over my head?
Right now I’m telling myself, it’s good to be uncomfortable. I started this bootcamp because I was too relaxed in my situation. A situation that was not going anywhere, not making enough money, and slowly turning my passion into an irritation . Attempting to remain comfortable was not working for me, so being uncomfortable was inevitable.
I have depression. My internal thoughts are generally wearisome, so I had built my life to make me feel at home. I rarely put myself in unwelcoming circumstances, just waking up seems to do that for me. Changing careers, therefore, seemed like an insane idea, and caused an incredible amount of anxiety. ‘It’s too late”, “I should have studied CS in college”, or “what could I know about computers when I didn’t own one until 2008” (yes that’s true… not until after I graduated college), have been constant thoughts.
It can be laborious learning a new language and distressing starting at a new school, but I guess that is just too bad. I’m here now, and I’m already in the deep end. Flatiron’s bootcamp is unsettling, wake-up calls tend to be like that. There are moments of clarity, normally followed by radical confusion. I’m definitely out of my comfort zone at this point, but I try to remember that everyone started somewhere.
During the first week of class, I got stuck on a lab long enough to start googling. Google led me to a video walk through done by former Flatiron students. At one point they repeatedly got hung up on a test, resulting in them breaking down the error code line by line. They decided one small change and ran their test again. it failed, only this time they had a new error code. But this error was met with sheer joy. No swearing, no clenched fists, and no frustration.
I can’t say I fully grasped why they were so excited right away, but it hit me nonetheless. Progress was made, something was learned and the solution was that much closer. This is what I was missing. These students, who were surely gainfully employed by now (I assume), were totally content with failing code. They embraced their error, and what it could teach them.
So, I’ve been trying to mimic their enthusiasm for new error codes, and I must point out, my performance has been much better in front of others than when I’m coding alone. But isn’t that in itself the point. I’m growing comfortable pretending I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. How meta…
I guess this course, and transitioning to a whole different life is forcing me to reconcile things within myself that I hoped I could put aside for the time being. Am I comfortable in this program, no. But will I buckle down, grab another cup of coffee and fake like I am, yes. It’s funny to think that by Christmas I’ll look back longingly on these first three weeks. Our material will likely seem simple in hindsight.(hindsight is so arrogant like that) A wise man said: “If you find yourself lost in the woods, f*** it, build a house. Well, I was lost but now I live here! I have severely improved my predicament!” This is Twenty-Twenty, it’s weird and uncomfortable, but this is how we live now.
Here’s great article on being comfortable with being uncomfortable
