"Life Happened. The Code Waited."

Part 5 of an honest journey from zoology to code. This one’s about the weeks I wasn’t coding.

New here? I’m a zoology postgraduate teaching myself Python on Kaggle, and this is Part 5 of that story.

Quick status check, almost two months later:

python
weeks_away = 7
coding_done = False   # what I told myself

Turns out that second line was wrong. But first, a confession.

The last time I wrote here, I said I kept coming back. Then I disappeared for almost two months. I’m sorry for the silence, especially to the few of you who were reading along.

It wasn’t because I gave up. Life stopped asking what I wanted to do and started telling me what I had to.

I applied for jobs. I got interviews. I got rejected. Then I applied again, and got rejected again. There were other things going on too, at home and in my own head, that I’m not ready to write about. Some days, getting through the day was the whole achievement.

And rejection has its own kind of error message:

RejectionError: application not selected
RejectionError: application not selected
RejectionError: application not selected

The difference is that Python at least tells you which line to fix. This one doesn’t. In Part 4, I wrote that there’s no traceback for “you tried and it wasn’t enough.” Apparently there isn’t one for interviews either.

If you’ve read Part 4, you know I already struggle with feeling behind. On Kaggle, the leaderboard said I wasn’t there yet. In my inbox, the emails said the same thing in politer words. Different rooms, same feeling.

Here’s what I didn’t expect: I never fully left.

In between everything, I opened Kaggle when I could. Not every day, and not for long. But I finished the geospatial analysis course.

I remember one evening in particular. I had a cup of chai, a free hour, and no plan. I opened Kaggle just to see what would happen, and ended up making my first map. It felt like a small win.

Maps, coordinates, data you can actually see on a screen. After weeks of feeling like nothing was moving, this was something that did. And for the first time in a while, I wasn’t opening a notebook to prove something. I was just curious again.

Other small things happened too. I started poking around GitHub. I’m not really working on anything there yet. I’m saving files, opening them, creating a repository, and trying to understand what I’m looking at. Everyone kept telling me to put my work on GitHub, and I kept finding reasons not to. Well, I’ve opened the door. I haven’t walked all the way in.

And one more thing, which I’ll keep a secret for now: I’m building a small project of my own. No spoilers. But for the first time, I’m not only learning from other people’s notebooks. I’m making something.

So here’s what this break taught me: learning doesn’t only happen when you’re at your best. Sometimes it happens in twenty minutes between interviews, on a tired evening, with a course you finish quietly and tell no one about.

I used to think stopping meant failing. Now I think it can also mean surviving something and coming back to the work anyway. Coding didn’t go anywhere while I was away. It waited. It never judged me for the break, which is more than I can say for myself.

My loop, rewritten:

while True:
    if life_gets_loud():
        pause()      # this is allowed
    come_back()      # this is the part that counts

I’m back now, and I want to post more regularly. I can’t promise a perfect schedule, because life has taught me not to, but I’ll keep showing up and writing it down. Right now I feel nervous, brave, and hopeful, all at once.

Still learning. Still getting rejected. Still coming back.

Now your turn. Which one are you today?

🌱 I paused something and came back
🔥 I’m still in the pause
🧭 I’m not sure where I’m headed

Tell me in the comments. No explanation needed, just the emoji, though I’d love to hear the story if you want to share it.

Next time: my first GitHub repository, and everything about it I didn’t understand.