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I went through something very much like you're going through several years ago. Over the course of about six months: Fiance left me. Lost my job. Relative died. Family dog died the next week. It was a mind-numbing, spirit crushing year of defeat. Eventually I decided to return to school with the intention of going to medical school, which for the next couple of years got my back on my feet. I learned that despite an abysmal first attempt at a CS degree (abysmal because of an utter lack of effort on my part) I was actually a much better student than pretty much any of my classmates. I regained my mojo, so to speak, leading up to a semester I took off in order to go code for a friend's company on a short-term contract that was supposed to give me enough cash to pay off some bills and finish my last semester. That was five years ago this month, and I still haven't finished that last semester. What I have done, however, is rediscover how I enjoyed development. For me it was a combination of Ruby, the Ruby community, and the problems I worked on that did it, along with a healthy dose of perspective and maturity. For other people it might be python, javascript, or any other platform that became enjoyable, and some probably discover that they're happier not being developers at all. I still have a bit of Imposter Syndrome to deal with, but I cope. Today I recognize there are things I'm good at, things I'm bad at, and a lot of in-between. The things I'm bad at I make myself do more often so I can get better at them. The things I'm good at I teach to others to help them along. I'm not dumping this out there as some sort of victory—more that you need to know that you're not the first to deal with problems like this, and you can come back from them. If you want to be a hacker, for gods sake find some to hang out with. The best thing you can do for yourself when you're in a rut is have someone pull you out—offer yourself up as a free pair for someone doing what you want to learn to do. You're not getting paid anyway right now, so use the time to learn something. Go to language groups—preferably one with a large community friendly to new developers. Make friends in the tech community around you, and you are all but guaranteed that one of them will eventually have a job for you. In the meantime, work on OSS projects, and if you don't feel confident about your coding skills, help write tests or documentation. (BTW, its a poorly-kept secret that tons of OSS code is written by people who don't really know what they're doing—they just figure it out the hard way. So don't be shy about contributing.) Get some exercise. Stop trying to work your way through SCIP and read something interesting. Most of all stop beating yourself up. Everyone deals with motivation problems at one point or another. And turn on the no-procrast feature of your HN profile. |