Last month, I wrote this in my “blog post ideas” file on Evernote:

Generally with me and procrastination, once i realize how bad I’ve been, I’m totally swamped with shame and guilt and then the thing I’m feeling shame and guilt about is tainted and I don’t want to deal with it (mainly because I don’t want to deal with myself and how disappointed/frustrated I am) so I don’t and the guilt is worse and then it’s just a straight up misery cycle. Don’t do. Feel guilty. Continue to not do. Feel guiltier. Stop everything. Wallow. Lie on the couch. Take a Sad Nap. This is how I put off emails I don’t want to send, work I don’t want to do, and art projects I’m not feeling confident about.

At some point I end up breaking out of the cycle, either because I’ve walked away from it and the guilt has subsided enough for me to be functional or (more usually) because the guilt is so bad it’s overcome the amount to which i don’t want to deal with it. Kind of like this:

The third option is that the thing I needed to do somehow disappears entirely, which I’ve found can happen when I get busy enough but (a) that level of busy-ness isn’t healthy at all and (b) that’s not an actual solution. Whether I actually get the thing done or manage to disappear it, the whole thing just feels bad.

I was hesitant about publishing my wallowing but in case you’re learning code and you’re finding yourself in a similar place I thought it might feel familiar. At the time I wrote this (sometime in July) I don’t think I was even halfway through the Object-Oriented Ruby lessons and was starting to doubt my ability to actually get myself through this program.

Today I pushed a fourth round of commits to my partner project Tic Tac Toe-with-AI program, the second of Learn’s OO Ruby final projects leading up to my first assessment. We’ve already submitted our code and got a great round of really helpful feedback from one of the learn instructors, so at this point our code improvements are really just for our own satisfaction. It feels weird and good to actually want to keep working; something that up to now I’ve really only experienced with making art.

All that to say: if you’re having a rough time, be kind to yourself and have hope and keep pushing and please reach out. One of the things that has helped me the most is being social with the Learn instructors and with my fellow students. When I started Learn I kept hearing people say “the most successful students are often the most social”, but now I fully understand why. Learning to code by yourself in your apartment (or office or library or wherever you happen to find yourself) can be lonely as hell and kind of de-motivating, but please remember that you got this, and that there are a whole group of people waiting for you online to help you get back to your feet.

At the end of my wallowing, I wrote this:

I haven’t touched Learn for 8 days. And that’s okay, because feeling guilty about it isn’t going to get me back to work. This time I’m starting with forgiveness.

So I did, and you should too, and if you need an accountability buddy, please hit me up on Slack or Twitter sometime at @klovae. You’re not alone.