Lost and Incompetent thoughts

I have a lump growing on my hand recently, so I’m going to write less.

My worries

Though a jobless life is free and happy, my worries about money have been growing. Even though I did get offers or opportunities, I found them really unsuitable for me at this moment. To be really honest, I gradually learned that the problem is not that I cannot find a job. It’s the learning through job search, past jobs, and current learning that makes my current opportunities eventually unsuitable for me. For instance, I thought I might be able to join a startup that would ask me to work on weekends. After working on an intense side project with a friend recently, I realized that the extra work time on the weekend isn’t worth the trade-off for my physical health, and negative emotions easily arise. Another example is that I got an offer from a non-US-based company that I really like. I don’t think I can find this kind of company in the short run, but in the long term, giving up San Francisco means that I give up the entire US job market, losing a big opportunity to be a good engineer through learning in SF and the Silicon Valley network that can help me raise funding if I want to build my solution in the future.

In the meanwhile, I gained immense learning and joy working on this side project with my friend, who is almost like a coding tutor, but this also means that I don’t have much energy left to look for a job — a process that I have constantly felt I find it and I lose sight of it, confused and conflicted.

My feelings

Today, during a social-emotional learning game, I shared my situation with friends, and they picked these cards to describe my feelings.

And they also give me cards on what I need. They told me I value learning, but need to rest, and maybe some recognition/confidence about myself and my future will help with resolving my worries.

And that self-recognition is what I really need to learn. I know my worries come from

• feeling that I’m the only one around my friend groups who doesn’t have a job and being afraid that it will last for a very long time with the incoming financial burden.
• knowing so much about who I am and what I want, so I cannot find a place I want to be in, but also not knowing enough to create that place for myself.
• conflicts of my current exponential learning in software that I want to keep while slowing down my entire job search progress.

I say that a sense of self-recognition is what I need to cultivate because if I have enough confidence, I will believe the future will work out just f i n e. I believe money will never be a problem, and I will craft the job space for myself. If you have followed me long enough, you will know that I’ve already grown a lot in handling the feeling of confusion and being lost, but as time goes on, money stress grows, so I need to grow too.

Inexperience = Low confidence?

I recognize that my confidence in myself really needs to grow throughout this current side project. My friend is already the best software engineer-teacher I’ve met in my life. He can explain things really well and is often encouraging. However, that sense of incompetence still pops out from time to time when the work becomes stressful. I am slower, and for sure, because I have been learning this for a month and he has coded for 6 years. Hence, I am always “incompetent” no matter whatever job I land on. I know this will probably not be an issue two years after. But whenever I start something new, the sense of incompetence will be there anyway. That’s why I often feel insecure in my prior job under the high-stress startup environment at my first job, especially when my ex-boss didn’t usually give recognition. I feel slow and sorry.

Yet, no one says inexperience and low confidence need to always go hand in hand. Is there any way we can separate them?