The March
It’s been awhile since I’ve written. The original plan was to write something about my journey every Friday. Well I’m pretty sure I’ve reached that goal exactly one time…
I’ve been having some legit struggles/hurdles/obstacles or whatever other word that says: “This is hard but if I really try I’ll get past it and be better off for it.” To quote someone near and dear to me:
My life got “F’d in the A with no R or L!”
Ready?
- My beautiful wife died.
- About a week later I had to put our dog down.
The dog part really makes this sound more like a country song than real life but that’s what happened. I don’t have it in me to write in great detail about those topics specifically. If that’s what your interested in I’d recommend checking out some writing by my Sister-In-Law: Every Breath is a Tiny Prayer, Slow Train, or Waves. Plus I feel it falls outside of the scope of my writings. (Trudging through life while reaching for your dreams and self improvement is how I’d currently classify the scope.)
As you may suspect my productivity has come to a screeching halt. I have the focus and attention of a squirrel on crack. The only consistency in my life is inconsistency. Getting out of bed in the morning is akin to voluntarily taking an ice cold shower. On the other side, sleeping is full of weird dreams that hint at sorrow and longing.
But we have no option but to move forward. Despite futilely wanting nothing more than to slow or halt time. Perhaps to savor a moment. Or just to try to get our shit together before moving onward. We can only decide where to place our feet as we are marched ever onward.
Onward we march…
After dealing with the many, many, many responsibilities that are involved with having a loved one pass away I looked back to the goals I had been pursuing. Ultimately I still wanted the same thing: to get off the forklift and into web development. The motivation to do so may be derived from a different source… or maybe it’s not. I haven’t conquered the why yet but the destination remains the same.
Initially I had some real reluctance to get back to it. It was a surprisingly emotional experience. I felt as though moving forward was the same as deciding to leave her behind. I really wanted to stay in that moment. That way I wouldn’t lose her. I also felt guilty… What if I’m successful in my endeavors? I wanted to improve our lives.
I did finally find myself in a coffee shop working as best I could.
My Brother-In-Law had given me a little something to work on for him. It was a great project for me. He wanted an embedded YouTube video to flip over and reveal donation links once it had finished playing. Perfect! I was able to get it done in an afternoon. I learned a few things, was distracted from current events, and once again being a little productive. It was actually my first taste of freelance work. It may or may not end up being used but that’s not really important. I’m just glad I could potentially help him out.
I also finally finished the Udacity course JavaScript Promises. It was a helpful course. I had worked with promises in the Grow with Google Challenge Scholarship content and decided to dive in a little deeper. Ideally I would have taken the promises course first but I figured it out and learned a lot. Since I had a large gap of inactivity right in the middle of the JavaScript Promises course I probably didn’t glean as much as I could have. Maybe I’ll revisit it one day. Or better yet just start using promises more!
Another step was finishing the FlexBox Zombies game. This was fun! It honestly does help you remember how to use FlexBox. It’s biggest win is probably the repetition. It does this without getting boring either. I took a few week break from the game and was still able to remember the techniques I had learned previously. I probably don’t remember some of the more advanced things but I’m sure I could pull off some layouts utilizing it without too much trouble or dependency on a cheat sheet.
With those things done I have to get back on track with some longer term goals. The Grow with Google Challenge Scholarship is wrapping up April 11th 2018. There will be a selection of people that move onto Phase 2. I really hope I make it but one of the biggest criteria for getting selected was community involvement. Obviously there was a large chunk of time where I wasn’t on the forums or the Slack channels. I didn’t get involved in any group projects that were starting during this time either. Granted it’s not a requirement for getting selected but it helps and a lot of people did do these things. I’m slowly diving back into the community but there’s only 5 days remaining. We’ll see what happens.
Being a logical person I’ve started work on my fall back plan. I’m back at freeCodeCamp finishing my Data Visualization Certification. I have about 6 projects to build before I can claim it. It’ll keep me busy for sure! The current project is a roguelike game built using react. I actually started work on it back in December or November. I took a break from it for the holidays and to complete the Grow with Google curriculum but am now working on it again. It’s hard jumping back into older code! Especially when I’ve learned so much since I started. It wasn’t too far from finished so I’m going to stick with what I have and just finish it. It’ll be a good confidence boost to get it done. Once I finish it I’ll put it on my Portfolio. If you want to see it before then here’s the repository.
My march is never ending but I continue to choose my steps. Even if right now they are out of sync and lacking rhythm…
I originally published this on Medium