Lately I’ve been watching a spider spin her web every morning on my walk. I live on a big enough piece of property that I do my walks here rather than travel because pandemic. Anyway, this spider redoes her web at least once a day (often twice) and I got to thinking. She doesn’t give up on the web just because it got wrecked. She keeps going, each time a chance to rebuild it stronger, or tighter or better connected to the branches or what have you. That in turn got me thinking about how I need to work on my confidence and habits and other things I want to change about how I move through and act on the world.
I never had a ton of confidence in my abilities as a programmer. A few years ago that little bit of confidence was actively wrecked by a guy I work with gaslighting the whole company (myself included) into thinking I should probably be fired. I actually really liked a lot of this job, I didn’t want to leave. Of course I started looking for a different position, but now I was totally behind the eight ball because I had literally no confidence I was worth hiring. I’m grateful that in the end we reorganized and was assigned a new boss who listened to me and helped me keep my job. Fixing the even deeper confidence problems I was left with has been an uphill climb over the last year and I’m nowhere near back to where I was (which wasn’t enough to start with, considering my skill level).
But that spider has shown me that just because things might seem futile, like an unending battle where I keep falling down forever, each time I needlessly apologize or feel bad about the code I’ve written or feel overwhelmed, it’s a chance to build myself stronger. Next time maybe I won’t apologize, maybe I won’t feel stupid for not seeing the answer myself when it’s shown to me. I’ll learn new techniques, I’ll train myself to spot my repeated mistakes, I’ll won’t apologize.
My web will get stronger.