Re-starting the Recurse Center
Today, July 1st, is the first day of my second batch at the Recurse Center. I first attended back in the Fall of 2020 with the intention of changing my career and becoming a programmer. I can say that I was successful at that, and after 3 and a half years of working as a programmer, I'm back again to become an even better one.
The big reason why I'm back is because I needed a change in my life. I was getting burnt out from work, spent more time doing management tasks than I liked, felt that my technical skills were plateauing, and realized that I was way too early into my career to feel this way! So, I saved up money for a while, then quit my job, took a month-long break, and am now in New York in order to fully immerse myself in the retreat. After just one day of meeting people and learning about their backgrounds and ambitions I feel newly invigorated and ready to throw myself into rewarding projects that will challenge me. The change of scenery doesn't hurt, either.
Another element of this big change for me is that for the past few years, my mental health, and consequentially my physical health, has not been the best due to Various Reasons. I took a baby step a few months ago by finding a therapist, but have recently realized that, oh, I actually have to put effort into the therapeutic process in order to reap its rewards. Shocking! This conclusion feels obvious in retrospect, but I had to come to it in my own time. And so, rather than falling into the familiar pattern of being hard on myself for not realizing this earlier, I want to make the most of my time now by leaning into the CBT techniques introduced to me, integrating physical exercise into my routine, and breaking the unhealthy habits that had left me feeling stuck.
This leads me into the one big directive that will guide everything I do for the next few months: Be Uncomfortable. Like a lot of humans, discomfort is, well, uncomfortable for me, and I tend to avoid it. But what the past few years has taught me is that I'll only grow if I'm uncomfortable, and I'm unhappy if I'm not growing. The transition mentioned above was my first step, this post is another, and I'll keep walking as time moves on. I've got some immediate goals in mind: I'd like to build a website all from scratch, handling the hosting, server, and client all by myself. Concurrently, I'd like to learn Rust and use it for my server. I'll blog the process throughout, putting myself and my progress out into the world. After that, who knows? Once I'm comfortable with what I've done, I'll move on to the next thing.