2bd's blog

I JUST STAGNATED FOR 2 YEARS

I am writing this on the last day of 2024. I am sitting on the same chair that I was sitting on yesterday and the day before that. I am staring at the same screen that I have stared at yesterday and the day before that. In fact, I have done the same thing for the last 731 days. Did you know 2024 was a leap year? I didn't until I started writing this. I have very few memories from 2023 and 2024. I have done nothing for these two years. There might be a few reasons, maybe even clinical ones, for this. But the matter of fact remains, I haven't done anything for 2 years.

Looking back, 2022 was difficult for me. It was difficult for most. And some had it way worse than me for sure. The pandemic was winding down but nobody was certain if it was the end of it or just another illusion of an end. For me though, it was the year into which I came with full steam. Even as the world stood still through the years of 2020 and 2021, I was proud to have been productive. I met new people, worked on interesting challenges, scaled products. But then I finally crashed into the immovable wall of Covid that I had managed to evade until then.

During that year, I went through three bouts of Covid-19, each somehow worse than the previous one. I was depleted by the end of it. Two years worth of dreary oppression of a global pandemic caught up to me in a few months. I deserved a break, to recoup and to rejuvenate. I had earned it. I am not lazy, am I? Covid can't slow me down. I was convinced that I would start feeling like my old self after I took this break. Just a day or two. A day turned into a week, a week into a month. I think the snug blanket of acceptance from my peers that what I was feeling was perfectly normal and the discourse online about long covid lured me into a trap of complacency. I was tired, yes. But did I try hard enough to change that daily feeling of exhaustion? I slowly shackled myself to that inertia of constant complacency and procrastination. Each day I would promise myself a fresh start the next day. I blinked. That fresh start on the next day never came. A month turned into a year, a year into two.

"An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force." As a coder who dropped out of high school, I grew up with the hustle culture. There wasn't been a single day in my teens and early 20s where I didn't learn something or work on a product. I had been in motion. As was the World. The pandemic has been a force to reckon with for everyone. It brought a lot of thing to a stop. But I think, it's time I get back into motion. It should have been sooner, but better late than never. This article is for me. It's for the present me to accept that I need to crawl out of this hole. It's for the future me to look back at as a reminder. Typing this article is a change of pace, instead of just staring at this screen. This marks the beginning as I vow to journal my journey back to my old self. New Year's resolution may be stupid, it might be meaningless. Nonetheless this is one, to at least take one step a day until I am back to running at top speed.