_Part 4 of an honest journey from zoology to code — this one's written from inside the struggle, not after it.
**It's 11 PM and I'm not writing code. I'm scrolling.
Someone on my feed left their corporate job eight weeks ago. Today they're announcing their first freelance client. Python, they say, in two months. Determination, they say. Consistency. A five-step plan I could follow too, if I wanted.
I open Kaggle next. I don't know why — habit, maybe, or something worse. Somehow I always land on the same kind of content: a grandmaster being interviewed, talking about the competitions they've won, the money they're making now, more stable than most full-time jobs. I didn't go looking for this person. I never do. It just shows up, like it's waiting for me.
I scroll down to check my own rank in the competition I've been chipping away at for weeks.
Not top 50.
Not top 100.
I close the tab. I already know what happens next, because it's happened before — ten days, fifteen days, more than once — where I just... stop.
Nobody really talks about this part. The part where you know the comparison is unfair and you do it anyway. The part where you stop for two weeks and come back ashamed, telling yourself it's the last time, knowing it probably isn't. The part where you're still staring at a blank cell some days, not because of anyone else, but because you genuinely don't know what to write next. So I'm writing it down.
The laptop stays shut. The notebook stays wherever I left it. I tell myself I'll come back tomorrow, and tomorrow becomes a week, and I go back to scrolling job listings in my actual degree instead, the ones that don't ask me to prove anything I haven't already spent five years proving.
Here's the part that embarrasses me most: I know better. I know those two-month success stories are the rare ones, dressed up and repeated because they're rare, not because they're normal. I know a highlight reel isn't a timeline. I tell myself this every single time.
And every single time, I compare myself anyway.
The loop
This isn't a one-time thing. It's a pattern I could set my watch to.
I get demoralized. Not just frustrated — a heaviness that sits on the whole thing. Code stops looking like a problem to solve and starts looking like a weight. Some days I open the editor and my eyes get heavy within minutes, like my body is trying to get me to stop before I even start.
Even the AI tools I learn from keep telling me the same thing: build projects, push them to GitHub, let your work speak for you. I know they're right. I still don't do it. Not because I don't understand why it matters — because by the time I'm demoralized enough to need the advice, I don't have anything left to act on it with.
I stop — ten days, fifteen days, sometimes more. I come back guilty, behind, rusty. I open a leaderboard or a "how I did it" post within the first hour of returning, as if to punish myself for the break. And somewhere in there, the same two questions show up, quiet but constant: Will I ever actually get anywhere with this? Will I always be the one who never quite makes it as a coder — and will this path even take me where my dreams actually are?
I don't have an answer to either one. I just keep asking.
The pain of losing that no one prepares you for
Nobody tells you that most of the time, you lose. Not in a dramatic way — just in the quiet, unglamorous way where you put in hours on a Kaggle notebook, tune what you can, submit, and watch your score sit somewhere in the middle of a leaderboard that doesn't care how long you worked on it.
There's no error message for "you tried and it wasn't enough this time." No traceback. Just a number, and the number doesn't move the way you hoped.
I've spent 2-3 hours a day on this — reading documentation, debugging notebooks, redoing the same feature engineering step five different ways to see if it changes anything. Most of that time doesn't show up anywhere. It doesn't show up on the leaderboard. It doesn't show up on GitHub, because half of it never gets pushed anywhere. It just disappears into the next attempt.
That's the part that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it: losing at code isn't one big failure. It's hundreds of small ones, stacked up quietly, that never really announce themselves as "you lost" — they just look like a rank you didn't reach, again.
The bind nobody puts in the two-month success posts
Here's the thing those posts don't tell you: most of us aren't choosing between "quit your job and go all in" and "give up." There's a much less glamorous choice sitting in between, and I'm sitting in it right now.
If I take a job — any job, even one that has nothing to do with code — I lose the hours I currently give to practice. If I don't, I have no income, and eventually that stops being a minor inconvenience and starts being the thing that decides everything else.
I know, logically, this doesn't have to be permanent. I know people learn in the margins — evenings, weekends, stolen lunch breaks — and still get there, just slower. Slower has never felt like enough when I'm the one living it, comparing myself to someone I've never even met.
Where I actually am
I don't have a resolution for you. I'm not going to pretend I closed my laptop, breathed deep, and came back stronger by morning. Some stretches I don't come back for two weeks.
What I can tell you is I'm still here, writing this instead of the code I haven't opened this week. That's not nothing. Some days it's the only thing I've got.
Still learning. Still stopping. Still, somehow, coming back.
If you've ever stopped and started again on something you care about — coding or anything else — how many times has it been? And when you were in the middle of stopping, did you ever wonder if the path was even the right one? I'm asking because I don't know yet. I'd rather hear it from someone else than pretend I have an answer.**_
Top comments (0)