No Stupid Questions

Yeah. It was so dramatic I knew it would happen again, and waited for it to catch it in the act.

I'm super smart, but also super lazy. I think I'm lazy because I'm smart. School was super easy for me, so I was always bored. I got poor grades overall because I didn't do the work. I could show up and crush the tests, but felt that homework was a waste of time and never did it. I took AP classes that give college credit, got a weak grade in the class but got 4s and 5s on the AP test. (Out of 5).

Poor grades in highschool meant I couldn't get into college right away. So I took a few years off and just sort of hung out for a bit. Then the click. I decided I wanted to go to college, not just any, but a really good school. So I went to the local junior college and asked the counselor how I could go there next year. He explained that the transfer program is a two year program, but I wanted to go next year. He said I probably won't succeed, but here's a schedule of classes that will get me the two years of credits in one year. 24 units per semester for two semesters. I got straight As. I just did all the work and crushed it. Got into my dream school and studied... philosophy.

Don't get me wrong, it was what I wanted to study. I got a great education, but it didn't set me up for a real job after school, more for grad school, but I felt like I was done with school for a while. I ended bartending and waiting tables for years. It was in this phase that I started thinking about that click. Something in me elevated me to get into my dream school within a year once I decided I wanted to. I found peace in that fact. I knew that despite my toiling, working hard just for rent, making it month by month in the city, that I'd elevate myself again when the time was right. I thought a lot about it. That one year of 48 units and straight As was such a blur, what was it that drove me? I was so confident it would just happen again though that I decided to try to consciously catch it in the act.

Sure enough it happened again. Enrolled in a coding boot camp. One year of absolute blur, crushed it, became a successful software engineer. I failed to notice while it was happening, but did think right after: "fuck that was it, that was the thing, I was right, it did happen again!"

Turns out I'm bipolar and was just making the most of my manic upswings.

When I was 12 learning C from a programmer friend

"This is too complicated"

"Why does it matter if it's complicated?"

Yeah actually, I don't have a reason to feel threatened by complicated things. There is no cost to tiring your brain, no cost to doing something tedious

My mother is a conservative who poured subtle homophobia into me when I was a child.

I was at a rave, high on MDMA (ecstasy back then), smoking in the rain in the parking lot with some other young people. This flamboyant gay guy was hilarious and making everyone laugh heartily. In that moment, I realized that we were the same. He just wanted to go out and have a good time and take drugs on a Saturday night, too. My homophobia was gone in an instant. (I won't lie; I had to have more exposure to LGBTQ people before I stopped noticing them so hard, but moving from the midwest to the Bay Area fixed that problem).

I was always mildly overweight growing up, despite doing enough sports and physical activity to be relatively fit. One day a flip switched and I started going to the gym daily. 6 months later, while doing cardio I pulled something or otherwise hurt myself and a month of back and forth later discovered I have herniated discs. My trajectory very much went downhill from there. PT made me miserable, the steroid epidural didn't work. I was too young for surgery. I had to get rid of my motorcycle since riding it caused me to be bedridden in pain. I had to stop any recreational sports. Going shopping is rolling the dice over whether I'll be in pain the next week.

Lift with your legs, not your back.

Yeah definitely. In the span of a month my wife suddenly left me to date women, my job laid me off, and my dog got sick and needed surgery. Everything I'd relied on for ten years just fell apart real fast and without a whole lot of warning. It's been quite the year trying to recover from all that. Dog survived, divorce finalized, still no job.