Train of thoughts

Hey Stranger,

I hope you're doing well!

It’s been a while, and I’m sorry. I made a promise to both you and myself that I would write more this year, but I’ve failed.

I’m not sure I can offer a good excuse for it.

Most of the time, I feel like I don’t have anything meaningful to say—nothing worth reading...

I really can’t stand broken promises, but for some reason, I’ve always found it more tolerable when I let myself down. When it comes to others, though, it’s a different story.

It’s frustrating, and honestly, it's starting to infuriate me.

I deserve to show up for myself the same way I do for others. So why, after all these years, is it still so hard? Do I not deserve everything I so freely offer to others?

Of course, I know what I deserve, but knowing is never enough if I can't take action or still struggle to truly follow through.

This year is coming to an end, and it’s hard to grasp how quickly time has flown.

Looking back, so much feels blurry, just like the past few years.

All I do is work, and that’s a problem because my life has become nothing more than that.

I no longer have hobbies. Even writing, something I love, doesn’t come easily anymore. That’s why only a handful of articles were posted this year, and so many remain unfinished drafts I can’t seem to complete.

Truthfully, it's hard to write when I feel I have nothing interesting to say—not often, anyway.

It pains me to admit it, but I feel like I’ve become quite boring, and that’s just exhausting.

Everything feels like a chore, and most days I’m simply battling my lack of energy to get through the day.

The worst part is that lately, I’ve been feeling stuck in a loop, living the same day over and over. Maybe I’ve only just truly acknowledged it, and perhaps that explains why everything feels blurry.

You see, I always keep myself busy, one way or another. Sitting with your feelings is uncomfortable, even painful. I’m not sure how many people actually do this voluntarily, rather than only when they’re forced to face the inevitable.

It’s hard to accept that we play a role in our suffering because we have no one and nothing else to blame once we do.

Sometimes, change happens when you’re truly tired of yourself and your excuses.

I can’t speak for everyone, but this blog is about my life and experiences. I try to take accountability for my mistakes, my inactions, and well, everything I deem as not 'future me' material.

I’ve asked myself several times this year, "Do you want next year to be the same—another blur?" 

It didn’t click at first, but when it finally did, it felt like the one thing that’s helped me break free from this trance I feel like I’ve been in.

I’m not motivated, and honestly, I rarely feel motivated these days, so it’s not something I can rely on.

Of course, motivation is a great start, but consistency truly makes the difference because motivation rarely keeps you going.

Motivation is like a flame—powerful, but it can easily be extinguished by the smallest breeze.

Someone very wise once told me that I control my actions, and my actions control my future. This thought often comes to mind—it’s almost become a mantra for me now.

It keeps me grounded when I feel like I’m about to spiral out of control, and it also reminds me of the person I truly want to be.

I’ve been so focused on superficial things. Of course, work is important (because I wasn’t born rich—kidding, but still, without work, I wouldn’t even have a roof over my head or food on the table, at least not in the U.K.). But it’s truly not worth making it your whole life. A job should be a means to an end, a way to live your life, because you work to live, not live to work. Unfortunately, I know many people will relate to the latter, and I’m sorry.

I can understand it all too well because for many years, that’s what my youth has been like.

Never mind all the financial struggles my family has been dealing with for years. No matter how much I tried to help them, even when I was barely managing to get by myself, I don’t think it made much of a difference.

It becomes draining because I barely get to see my family in person, yet I know all their struggles. They, however, haven’t known anything about how I’m doing financially for years because I don't see the point of burdening them with this.

Obviously, since May this year, things have been easier after I was promoted from apprentice to junior software engineer. But don’t think I’m making six figures or anything close to that.

I’m just doing better. I don’t have a social life, so I guess that makes it easier.

Boring, I know. Like I said, I don’t do much for fun. I’m mostly just trying to save up, while also treating myself a little from time to time.

I still have expenses I’ve been postponing for years because I was broke and couldn’t afford them. These aren’t whims or wishes—they’re necessities. I’ve been doing my best to improve my financial knowledge so I can make better choices.

Right after 2020, when my mental state was at its worst and I hit rock bottom thanks to that cursed au pair job, I made a mistake that cost me the savings I’d worked so hard to set aside. It put me in a terrible situation for a long time after. I wish I could forgive myself and move on, but even after all this time, I still can’t.

At least it doesn’t cross my mind as often or obsessively as it used to.

I’ve vowed to myself that I will do everything in my power to never again go through something like that. It’s really important to have a safety net, but it’s equally important to be able to count on yourself in times of need.

This isn’t an article about money, budgeting, and so on, although I know I said I would write one at some point.

I just wanted to highlight that being in tech doesn’t automatically mean making bank.

Of course, that’s possible, but it depends on the country you’re in and your level of experience.

This is also why I’ve been so focused on work to the point of doing a lot of unpaid overtime (nobody asked me to, I just kept working late to study more), and why I spent many weekends doing nothing but studying and trying to improve myself.

Now, I feel burned out, and this is the kind of field where you might always feel like an imposter.

There are days when I feel like I simply wasn’t made for this, like I can’t do it, and I don’t belong—especially when I’m still struggling with some things, or I have to keep revising them because I forget or can’t grasp them well. Then I look at the never-ending, ever-growing list of things I still need to learn, and I feel even more drained.

Other days, I feel the opposite—proud of myself and smart, knowing that all my hard work is paying off and that I’m making so much progress!

My point is that it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole, trying so hard to cram knowledge into your head faster and faster, when in reality, it took most people years to learn it and actually become confident and improve their technical skills. This is even worse when you don’t have a focused role (something I’ll need to change sooner rather than later!).

However, this is easy to forget most of the time, especially when you’re under a lot of pressure—not only from others but also from yourself.

I’ve been trying so hard, first to prove myself with the apprenticeship so I could pass it, and then to make sure I’d get an offer as a junior engineer. It stressed me so much knowing that my contract was about to end, and I still didn’t know anything concrete about my future at this company. Realistically speaking, I was nowhere close, financially, to start over again by spending months without an income while trying to find something else in London, which is so pricey. You have to pay a lot just to breathe the polluted air here, and I’m so tired of this city...

So what did I do? I pushed myself even harder. After receiving the junior role, I mentioned that I was unexpectedly moved to two different teams, which meant a lot of change in a short time—different projects and too many new people.

There was a brief opportunity to return to my first team and continue working on what, apparently, had been platform engineering with a side of DevOps all along.

However, I thought the right choice was to stick with my current team, as the work seemed easier and more consistent, which is exactly what I needed. I wanted more time to practice and improve before worrying about too much context-switching again.

Fast forward to now, I’m not so sure I made the right decision. Maybe I did, because it helped me discover what I don’t like and what I don’t want to pursue in my career.

While having more consistency with the type of work I’ve been doing has been helpful, it’s also been stressful working with some people who’ve made comments like, "you should have known this by now," "maybe you should study this in your free time," and "you made a syntax error; maybe you should go back to learning the basics." (it was such a small, insignificant error that didn’t even show up as an issue, but I missed it and was shamed for it. Lovely!)

Thankfully, these comments were made right when I joined the team, during the summer, and I haven’t heard anything like that recently.

However, the team was also aware of the type of work I did as an apprentice, and then I had to try learning new things and working on different projects while getting used to many new colleagues.

Regardless, these comments came from people who simply couldn’t explain anything.

My manager kept pushing me to reach out to one of these people, possibly even become his mentee, unaware of the comments, since we were working on the same project.

I did my best to avoid pairing sessions with him. Instead, I reached out to the only senior on the team, who at least could explain things and offer help without being condescending or judgmental.

This experience reinforced the type of senior I want to become: I want to be the kind of person others—especially those with less experience—feel comfortable reaching out to for help. I want them to feel safe sharing when they don’t understand something or when they’re struggling to figure out what to do.

Do you want to be a senior engineer but can’t even simplify concepts you should know well by now? If your explanations sound like you’re just reading documentation poorly, if you have a superiority complex and try to make less experienced engineers feel stupid, yet still want to mentor someone for that promotion, that’s not going to work well. At least not in my company as they value mentorship a lot.

My manager is the type of person with unrealistic expectations—some of his requests genuinely exceed what a junior engineer can do. Still, I’ve been trying so hard: studying constantly, taking lots of notes, and pushing myself to get exposure to different applications I hadn’t worked with before. I volunteered to take on difficult tickets that weren’t meant for a junior just to learn more and improve. I stressed myself out because the performance reviews were coming up, and since my company loves having you gather written feedback from everyone on your team, I wanted to make sure everything went well.

I was also taking on extra responsibilities, like being the buddy to one of the current apprentices. This is more of an informal mentoring role, and I helped her with all aspects of the apprenticeship—checking her portfolio and guiding her on how to approach writing about projects to ensure she met the requirements. I’ve been doing this since January, and while the arrangement was quite flexible, I can’t say the same for the one with the intern.

During the summer, the company hired interns, and I volunteered to be a buddy for one of them, knowing how challenging it can be to navigate the company and the work.

Since the internship was three months long, I set up weekly calls to offer my help and support however I could. Sometimes, those sessions were just about listening to the challenges the intern was facing within the team, and that was okay too.

My point is that I’ve really tried to help, going above and beyond by offering informal mentoring, which isn’t easy—especially considering I’m still just a junior.

I’ve also continued my mentorship with the staff engineer from my initial team to ensure I’m tracking the work I’ve been doing and approaching new and ongoing projects in a way that will support my goal of eventually applying for a mid-level role. I ask questions, take notes, share what I’m doing, and ask for feedback. I’ve been fully invested in doing my role as best as I can.

When it was finally time for the performance reviews, I had nine written feedback responses, which was apparently a lot and very impressive for a junior. Most of them were positive, although the same person who had made those comments earlier managed to sneak them into the feedback in a very corporate way.

I think I need to start doing this too, stop being so nice and start being more honest because I know that the moment my filter comes off, I am going to hurt a lot of egos and it's going to be well-deserved!

During the bi-weekly one-to-one sessions I have with my manager, which are supposed to be check-in sessions, he’s told me many times how I’m doing great and even exceeding his expectations for a junior engineer. He’s said that my progress over the past few months is obvious, and he’s impressed by how proactive I am because he never has to tell me to pick up work, share updates, or ask for help, and how involved I am in team projects and informal mentoring outside the team. He even said I’m basically performing as a mid-level engineer in many ways.

I wrote my self-reflection and it was long, highlighting all my work and progress, and he wrote something similar for his evaluation of me.

All sounds great, right?

I thought so too—until I saw that the rating he gave me was "Good".

I could have gotten the same rating for doing the bare minimum without stressing myself out or pushing myself as hard as I did.

Apparently, I have so much potential to get a "Great" by the end of February—all I need to do is work on more complex tickets. But of course, this depends on the project I’m working on and the impact of that work (as if I get to choose the team's projects).

Another unexpected thing was that, in the middle of the performance reviews, the company suddenly announced a wave of layoffs, even though just two months earlier they had talked so much about performing the best they ever had. Hilarious!

Many people were affected, and they even implemented a hiring freeze—only to start talking about hiring junior engineers right before the people affected by the layoffs left the company. How corporate of them!

I was genuinely stressed that I could be affected as well, especially with all the secrecy before the people affected were informed.

Now, whether there will be another wave or not, I don’t know.

Right before the redundancy, I went home and worked from there for a bit, and my mom finally had the surgery she had been postponing for a decade due to our financial situation and the fear that taking sick leave—especially for the three months she would need to recover from this complex and risky surgery—could jeopardize her job.

She had started to experience constant pain, and it eventually became something close to an emergency surgery. I convinced her to go through with it since I was home and fortunate enough to be able to cover some of her costs—not only for the surgery (which wasn’t much because of her insurance) but also for some home-related expenses.

The hospital she went to is one of the best in my city, but it’s also the strictest, being a former military hospital. The visiting hours are really limited, and you aren’t allowed to wait in the hospital during surgery. I was able to see her right before she went in, and then they sent us home.

I was too stressed and on edge, so I continued to work to keep myself occupied.

Of course, that day also happened to be the day of my performance review meeting, where we went through all the feedback, my self-reflection, and my manager's evaluation. He was aware of the situation since I was entitled to three days of emergency leave, but I decided to take the following day off after she was out of surgery. I even managed to visit for five minutes after her surgery, but they didn’t let me stay longer.

Looking back, I should have taken the day off. Instead, I kept working to keep my mind occupied because my hands were shaking, and I was pacing around.

So freaking stupid!

Two weeks later, when I was back in the U.K., my manager spoke to me in person about my rating right after the redundancy was announced. He started by saying how well I’m doing with everything, then proceeded to mention the "good" rating. I had to look away and focus on something else because I was already so stressed, and this just got on my nerves. I seriously wondered what it would feel like to smack him in the face and leave, because I felt like a clown. What frustrated me the most was that, after all my effort, I ended up feeling like I wasn’t good enough. My performance review went from great to exceptional, and now it’s just "good"—even though I’ve been trying so hard to keep growing, and I know I’m doing so much better now than when I was an apprentice.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but when I got home, despite telling myself I was fine, I burst into tears for about five minutes while trying to go to sleep. I just felt like I had failed.

The next day, while still feeling disappointed, the realization slowly crept in. Most likely, I won’t get a better rating in two months because he’ll always find something to nitpick, and that’s fine. If I’m going to get another "good," I might as well just do the bare minimum—do my job without going the extra mile, finish work when the clock hits 5:30 PM, stop working in my free time, and, most importantly, stop stressing myself out.

It’s honestly not worth it!

This was not a pleasant experience, maybe because I already have such high expectations of myself. But I’ve come to realize that it was a blessing in disguise.

Why? It forced me to reflect on my life, everything I’ve done since getting this job, and how my life has become nothing but work. I made no time for myself—not even to make sure that I’m taking care of myself.

In the last three years, I’ve gained weight and grown increasingly uncomfortable in my body. I’ve started to despise my looks again, and I’ve stopped doing things just for myself—things that are good for me, instead of only focusing on climbing the corporate ladder.

But do you want to hear the worst part? In the last three, maybe four months, I’ve started experiencing a lot of hair loss. It’s all a result of stress, but also a statement of my self-neglect.

I’ve had hair loss before, but never this bad. While no one else can really notice it yet, I do.

I have to admit, it’s affecting me a lot. Maybe for some people, this is superficial, but for me, it feels like losing a part of me that I’ve always loved, through both good and bad.

It’s the one thing that’s always been constant in my life.

I’ve spent my whole life liking only my hair when it came to my looks—something I never wanted to change. It’s the only thing that brought me joy every time I looked in the mirror.

I’m not sure if I can stop it and get my hair back to how it was before, but I’m trying different things. Most importantly, I’m starting to adopt an "I don’t give a f*ck" attitude toward many things.

It’s clear that I need to lower the stress and prioritize myself. I’ve always known that, but somehow, I kept pushing myself, telling myself it was fine to keep going a little longer.

I don't even get paid enough for all of this, so I don't make enough to use money to replace what I am losing.

Again, perhaps you’re wondering why I wrote so much about work when I said this article isn’t about work. Well, this was a wake-up call.

I looked in the mirror and asked myself: is this how I want my life to be?

Do I want to keep prioritizing work over my health? Realistically speaking, this was one of the main reasons I’ve been postponing restarting my knee investigation and trying to push to finally get my knee surgery done. At first, it was the fear that taking medical leave without a permanent contract could jeopardize my chances of getting an offer at the end of the apprenticeship. Then, I wanted to make sure that, as a newly promoted junior engineer, I’d do my best to keep improving and working hard in my new team.

Well, we’ve seen how much my hard work has been appreciated since I got this promotion. All the empty words about how great I’m doing, but an average rating.

Now, I’ve made the decision that I’ve had enough. It’s time for me!

I’m already paying for private insurance, and since I don’t have a diagnosis for my knees yet, I’ll try to start the investigation again soon—and I’m going private.

I will ask for what I need, and I’ll push to get the surgery done because I’m tired.

Stress makes the pain flare up badly, and I feel like my knees are breaking, even when I’m just sitting.

I also wanted to write about this sooner, but for some reason I couldn't so here it goes.

At the end of December last year, I also had a health scare. I was taking a shower and I randomly felt a lump in one of my breasts which made me panic. I was back home, two days before my flight to London and I really wanted to get a scan but since it was the holiday season, everything was closed. After returning to London, I waited almost a month hoping that it would simply go away on its own but it didn’t. When I finally worked out the courage to contact my doctor, I got a same-day appointment for a check-up, the doctor told me that indeed something was there and it didn’t feel small… 

She told me that I should really have the scan to make sure it’s nothing serious, however, the only way to get that scan is to be sent through the cancer branch. It took less than two weeks and I was scheduled for an appointment with another doctor at the hospital, I was told the same thing that it’s best to have a scan to confirm it’s nothing worrisome, so a few days after that appointment I returned to the hospital thinking that it would be just a scan. To my surprise, it turned into a very painful appointment. A new doctor saw me, and after another check-up I was told I needed to have a biopsy done. I did not know how a biopsy would be performed, so without any warning, or numbing cream at least (I remember her just cleaning the area), she pulled out a medical scalpel, made an incision and then inserted a massive thick needle. I was bleeding, it was painful, and the nurse was also pressing so hard to stop the bleeding, and then I finally had that ultrasound scan too.

I don’t understand why so much pressure is applied for an ultrasound, but considering I was also bleeding, the whole experience was scary. 

At least I was told the good news that it is something called fibroadenoma, which is a benign (non-cancerous) solid breast lump. The issue with it is that it’s at surface level, I cannot physically see the lump, but all I need is to gently touch and it’s there.

Plus it is bigger than 3cm, and given its size, the chances of it shrinking are small and instead, it will only grow more (which I already feel like it’s happening) the doctor suggested surgery, and she was ready to make the next appointment for that.

I was told that the larger it gets, the bigger the scar could be, and surgery would require general anaesthesia. If it were smaller, the process would have been simpler: vacuum-assisted excision biopsy with local anaesthetic.

I was feeling overwhelmed, plus I couldn't stop my tears from falling because of the pain and the news, and I decided to take some time to think about it and would reach out when I was ready.

I know I will need to keep monitoring it, and have regular check-ups but for the time being, I want to avoid the surgery, it doesn’t cause any pain but I won’t be able to avoid it forever. The larger it gets, the bigger the chances of leaving a dent after it is removed. However, I know I am really lucky that this is nothing serious. I was terrified waiting for the appointment at the hospital…

So, if I sum up everything that has happened, it definitely feels like a wake-up call because it shows just how much I’ve been neglecting myself.

Life is too short to think you are not a priority for yourself! 

Well, now for the good news! I’ve finally made the decision to go to the gym, and I’ve been consistently going three times each week for the past two months.

I’m determined to make myself strong again, put myself first, make time for myself, and find joy in exercise like I did for many years before. When there’s a will, there’s a way!

Did I really need to write this massive article to tell you that I’m finally going to the gym? Maybe not, but I think it was important to show you how bad news and challenging experiences can open your eyes and push you to do the right thing for yourself, without finding more excuses.

The best part is that I’ve cut down on my caffeine, and I don’t even use pre-workout anymore before heading to the gym—I have enough anger right now that fuels each of my workouts!

In conclusion, start putting yourself and your health first because, whether you want to believe it or not, you are worthy. You are the most important person you’ll ever have in your life!

Make this change now, before life finds a way to remind you of what your priorities should be!

I hope you find this article a bit insightful, even if it’s my longest so far!

Thank you again for reading and for your constant support!

I’ll post again before the New Year, but in the meantime, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to those of you who celebrate!

Take care of yourself!

Today's song is one I found recently and I really like it: https://youtu.be/m5FU9TTA6q0?si=Jkw22cvJlqvbCcvt

Also, I find winter dreadful, so here’s a beautiful picture I took of a beach in Bulgaria.