I really am myself, but can I prove it?

I had my first big I-left-my-home-I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing-maybe-I-can't-do-this meltdown today (and yes, that was many ideas strung together but it was a complicated meltdown that will probably happen again). The catalyst was that the US Postal Service appears to have lost the package that had my driver's license and I'm flying to Detroit for a wedding on Friday. I took the plane here without ID, and they let me on the flight, but they do grill a fair amount and give you a "special" search. As a side note, it feels weird to have no identification and not be able to prove that I am myself. Existentially, there is something strange about not being able to say "but I am me--can't you tell?" Anyways, this led to a larger panic about why I was here, and whether I was succeeding.
After a period of spinning and trying to sort it all out on my own, I reached out for help and went for a walk with one of the TAs. He gave me really good advice--which was to have fun with the material and not feel like I'm trying to prove anything to myself or compete with anyone. I needed that reminder. I had been being stubborn and wanting to find a masterful solution to a difficult problem, rather than asking for help, and managed to frustrate myself and waste hours in the process. He actually told me I doing really well, and, honestly I knew this part, that I was still ahead of schedule. I was just getting down that I was less ahead than some people, which is awfully silly.
With that advice, I decided to do one of the optional assignments rather than force myself to move on. I had fun and made this:

In it you can enter two numbers and click on a mathematical operation and the result will show up at the bottom immediately (without reloading). That took more work than you might think, but was very rewarding and helped me understand AJAX a lot better.
However, I don't see this being the last time I face this type of freak out. This is scary and it's lonely sometimes, and life would be easier if I was just at home. But there is a reason I am doing this, and I think it may be more than just needing a new career. I do love coding, and I also needed some perspective on my life, which I am getting. The most important thing I've learned is that over the last few years, I've really built a life I love back in DC. I hadn't seen that until I was far away.
I also learned something through riding a bike (not how to ride a bike though--I already knew that). The cheap craigslist bike I'd been riding lost a part, after I incorrectly removed the wheel. I asked my (amazing) host if I could borrow her bike and she recommended a comfort bike she had around. When I rode it the 8 miles to my program over the next week I had an epiphany: I was not nearly as bad at biking as I'd thought--I hadn't been riding good bikes! I had so much less trouble going over hills and the 8 miles felt easy and energizing rather than exhausting. Like studying coding, it was a better fit for me and that made all the difference. Sometimes I blame myself when something isn't working well, rather than thinking about what I can change. But maybe there's nothing so horrible wrong with me after all.

Dreaming in PHP and MySQL

Every morning for the past few weeks, I wake up realizing I am perfecting code that I can no longer remember, as it dissolves with my dream. For the past week and a half those dreams have involved ERD modeling, SQL statements, and most recently PHP. Every day I think the task at hand is unconquerable and by the end, I find myself cheering (trying to do it quietly--we all do it occasionally) when the seemingly insolvable problem has come to a simple resolution and the figure I have been trying to get onto the screen appears.
Today, all the pieces we have been learning began to connect, as I started learning how to access databases in PHP. (For those who don't know, PHP is a back end scripting language, meant to bridge the gap between what you see on the screen and the data that is stored by the server.) However, I soon paused the video as I decided to slow down and try to digest my other lessons first.
I have to remember to slow down a lot as I find myself getting competitive with other students. As a friend reminded me, this can be good motivation, but it can also make me race through assignments faster than I should. Luckily, I am learning about myself that I am not good at not doing my best on my work. I always double back and force myself to get the answer, even when I think I've moved on.
Also, we had our "belt exam" last Friday. I was literally certain that I had failed. I managed to miss part of the directions, so after four hours of obsessing over my HTML and css I spoke to other students who started mentioning using jQuery (a Javascript library for animating the screen), and I freaked out. With less than twenty minutes to go I added what I could and then went over time cleaning it up. I then spent fifteen minutes explaining to a friend of mine how I felt like a failure and shutting out everyone around me.
Today, I got the results...9.5, or "near perfect." All right, I admit it. Sometimes I might catastrophize.
Also, last week, when we worked on jQuery, I made a Digital Therapist page. It was a pretty horrible therapist (pretty much just repeated back what you put in, and not even all that well), but a lot of fun to create. (I enjoy being a bad therapist occasionally after spending so much energy trying to be a good one). I'm still not much closer to knowing how I can use these skills to improve the world (unless this amazing job helping non-profits ends up working out, but I'm trying to maintain healthy pessimism in case it doesn't), but it's fun to bring some of myself into the work.
Speaking of dreaming, it's about time to do some of that.

Finished my first week!

I’m lying on the bed of the room I’m staying in, watching cheesy TV. It was been a long and tiring week, and I’m about to start another. It was a lot of fun, and really exciting, but draining (mostly because I averaged about 12 miles of biking every day). It's hard being so far from home. The weather here is great, and it is beautiful, and I have great hosts, but I hadn't realized how much I had settled into DC over the past few years. Also, I cannot seem to understand the CalTrain system--I keep missing my trains, which is partly responsible for all the biking.

There is a lot to learn but I’m surprised by how quickly I've been able to pick up new skills in this environment. This week we covered HTML and CSS. My remote mentor said that my code looked like I was more experienced, and I think my ego inflated a little too much. There was still some humbling to come, but I've felt good about my pace through the work so far. We learned how to deconstruct sites into HTML and CSS just from a screenshot. It was a lot of fun to get to obsess over little details. The best advice they gave us (that I didn't fully use until the last assignment) was to "work from the outside in" which basically means layout your page first in HTML and CSS then fill in the details. Also, use Web Inspector or Firebug (depending on your browser)--it really is amazing!

After all that work, we learned how to use Twitter Bootstrap to do very easy front-end work. I was able to create this:

I got excited and did extra work on the assignment to make more pages. Next week, we’re going to learn JQuery and Javascript so we can actually make our buttons and pages do things. I can’t wait! 

However, I need this day of rest. Time to find out who Des will choose on the Bachelorette, and why she keeps crying in the promos...