Fear and Loathing and Anxiety in Pittsburgh

I seriously am not doing well right now. It’s all mental. It is all fear and anxiety. I already know this.

Crises of confidence, I know. I am not really eating well, if at all, I am never feeling well and rarely go to class. I emailed my mentor Karen at 2 am on Sunday morning. She emailed me right back.

I admitted I hated Java and just wanted to be a web dev. That I honestly didn’t know if CS or IS [1] was right for web development. She emailed me back immediately and promised me we’d talk through it.

I eventually sat down and coded for a while. I had the textbook open on my external monitor and VSCode on my main Macbook screen. I Googled and issue that was hanging me up and found a solution. Just that quickly, the clouds lifted and I was ready to tackle CS again.

I have never been this scared or this committed to one thing. I never felt like my life depending on something so much as I do right now. I don’t want to get into specifics but I am coding for opportunity and because I freaking love building cool stuff. Nothing brings on the warm fuzzies or literal fist pumps like a fully compiled, running, piece of software. Not my writing. Not sketching. Nothing [2].

Part of this is self-fulfilling, right. You are assigned an assignment, you need to go to all the classes to get it and if you miss one or two, the three weeks you have to do it become four days and now you’re in a bind because you need functioning software in four days. The anxiety builds on itself and you’re left curled up in a ball in the corner.

This is my issue and I will deal with it.

Tomorrow I am going to make a concerted effort to head to the CRC [3] and sit down with Emilee Betz, perhaps the coolest young lady I’ve met at Pitt and work on the Card class and Blackjack class for Infinite Blackjack. I will also have to go over my player class.

Getting sleep is something I haven’t been getting enough of. It is taking its toll. So after this blog post, I am going to at least eat something, and read until I am tired.

I will not fail.

I seriously am not doing well right now. It’s all mental. It is all fear and anxiety. I already know this.

Crises of confidence, I know. I am not really eating well, if at all, I am never feeling well and rarely go to class. I emailed my mentor Karen at 2 am on Sunday morning. She emailed me right back.

I admitted I hated Java and just wanted to be a web dev. That I honestly didn’t know if CS or IS [1] was right for web development. She emailed me back immediately and promised me we’d talk through it.

I eventually sat down and coded for a while. I had the textbook open on my external monitor and VSCode on my main Macbook screen. I Googled and issue that was hanging me up and found a solution. Just that quickly, the clouds lifted and I was ready to tackle CS again.

I have never been this scared or this committed to one thing. I never felt like my life depending on something so much as I do right now. I don’t want to get into specifics but I am coding for opportunity and because I freaking love building cool stuff. Nothing brings on the warm fuzzies or literal fist pumps like a fully compiled, running, piece of software. Not my writing. Not sketching. Nothing [2].

Part of this is self-fulfilling, right. You are assigned an assignment, you need to go to all the classes to get it and if you miss one or two, the three weeks you have to do it become four days and now you’re in a bind because you need functioning software in four days. The anxiety builds on itself and you’re left curled up in a ball in the corner.

This is my issue and I will deal with it.

Tomorrow I am going to make a concerted effort to head to the CRC [3] and sit down with Emilee Betz, perhaps the coolest young lady I’ve met at Pitt and work on the Card class and Blackjack class for Infinite Blackjack. I will also have to go over my player class.

Getting sleep is something I haven’t been getting enough of. It is taking its toll. So after this blog post, I am going to at least eat something, and read until I am tired.

I will not fail.