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Senior @ Deis. ep12. Flashback
Main Plot Starts Here
It turns out that something never stops.
Internship
Never have I ever gotten something real and legitimate on my own until 4/1. Almost felt like a joke. But hey here we are.
Maybe I am writing this just to make myself feel real cringe a couple weeks later, but here I want to tell every person who is seeing this post: keep going. No matter how fucked up you are, keep the fuck on. I failed every single OA, interview, and screen call, and got a historical-low GPA last year, carrying on to this year. Randomly applied to some company, got a manager-reach-out, filled in at least 2000 words for the take-home, got grilled by the DevOps lead, and here we are. You might be starting out, still getting excited for every LinkedIn connection and every recruiter’s auto message. You might put all your hope on one thread, fail deeply, panic and cry for several hours, get the hopes up for another chance, just to fail again, until a point where you could not fall asleep at night. Your heart beats way too fast. Your brain is aching from the back of your neck. You became grumpy and pessimistic about every single thing. You drank until you needed to call the school police. One day, you decided to come back into the game, but this time not to put all the eggs in one basket. You still have insomnia, and you still panic, but now you have the experience of failure, of people raising eyebrows at you, frowning at you, telling you you’re not good enough, and your closest people judging you. You acted as if you were so nonchalant but deep down you know you’re not. After the interview, you still refresh Gmail 20+ times a day. You still feel like a total imposter and loser who makes typos writing a for loop and puts semicolons in Python. But you should be proud of yourself for keeping on going, although it sucks.
It was a cold apply out of nowhere. Sheer luck, maybe? I still don’t know why out of the 678 applicants, Derek chose to email me. I really don’t know. Probably just because I was refreshing Gmail on a Saturday night, and decided to apply for some job recs, and reply to some emails. I never knew. And my heart still beats one second slower until now.
The prep, the nerves, the headaches, and the nausea. I’m sure I am not the only one. The lies and the chills. I really started to feel when Bhakti, a long long time ago, told me she “starts to care less and less about things.” Truth is, I need to give up so much to become normal. Is it just me? The information overload is hitting me again as if I have ADHD. At the most random times, I would want to cry, and out of nowhere, I would think of anecdotes and burst into laughter. Did I win?
It Never Goes Away
Somewhere in the past and present, I never stopped hating myself. Still don’t know React and SpringBoot. Still don’t really get recursion. Still don’t have an end-to-end real project. Still lie to myself and have concentration issues. Still plays tennis like a pussy cat in crucial moments. Can you shut the fuck up? The career stuff stopped bugging me just for now. But the academic stress is sending me. No matter what grades I get, how many matches I win, how many applications I send, how many hours I study, I always panic. I look up to the young prodigies, and I panic. Can I really become a software engineer? Am I just the ultimate imposter? Am I a CS person? Something he said never left my head. It’s just mean but true and straight to my heart. Yes I chose this field because of some weird sentiment, but is there anything wrong with that? The weird sentiment carried me to a B.A. and great friends. The weird sentiment taught me about myself in the same way that tennis did. The weird sentiment calmed me down, kept me up, drove me crazy over all this time. Should I be grateful? Do I still want to continue CS after grad school? Why is it surprising that I want to go into the same field after secondary ed? I’ve never felt so bad about myself and as if everything I did was wrong. It started out in October with Meta and has never stopped, and probably never will.
I kept judging myself, and somehow, people around me are passing judgment left and right, but I only have so much self-deprecation to give. I am so thankful to college that somehow I have learned the ability to laugh in challenging situations. Somehow I have learned to attack myself first before everybody else attacks me. But somehow I have never learned to detach from people and objects and be emotionally stable, and somehow I can never get over something or someone. If four years of college have ever taught me anything, it is that it never goes away. You think it would after the next exam, next semester, next meeting, next argument, next match, whatever the fuck, but it never does. It really just never goes away. If anything, it only keeps on going in a way that always sweeps you off your feet and makes you turn into some bipolar bitch who laughs and cries at the same time. But that is the beauty of it — it builds character. You will survive, you will have a good time, and you sure will come back to this post, and tell me that I am right.
Next up:
Senior @ Deis. ep14. TBC.
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