Goodbye California

According to the Virgin America seat screen in front of me, I am writing this at 35,106 feet, and the little red plane on the Google map puts me somewhere in the middle of Utah. Ever since we started to taxi, this Jolie Holland song has been running through my head:

At least it was just running through my head until I decided to actually listen to it as I am now doing. I’ve loved that song for a long time and never thought it would apply so literally to me, in that I am leaving California and feel joyful about it, which is how the song feels to me.

I am really happy to be going to the home I have made for myself back in DC. It’s hard to even imagine how great it will be to return to my own apartment and be in my space again, and see all the people I have missed.

Of course, I am especially happy because I am accepting a job back home that I think will be really good for me. It is scary to write about because I am afraid it will fall through somehow now that I’m so excited about it. This job feels right for me, because I have decided that I can still call myself a social worker. I will get to work directly with non-profits on a software tool called CiviCRM. The people who work in the company are clearly passionate about their work and about helping mission-driven organizations. I will help with customer service, trainings, support, but my job title is CRM Developer—so it’s official, I am a web-based software developer. It will not feel real until I am working there daily and have proven myself on the job. However, I am trying to appreciate this time, where I can relax and continue teaching myself coding for fun.

I can’t believe how well everything has worked out, and I can’t help remembering four months ago when I was deciding whether to do this. I agonized over the decision, afraid I was going to ruin my life, yet once I did it, I leapt with both feet in and haven't had many regrets. I can’t really remember many days where I hated coding. There were days I was tired or didn’t know where to start, but once I got involved in a project it was usually hard to stop.

I’ve had a lot of people want to talk to me about Coding Dojo and getting into coding. I don’t know if the program I did would be right for everyone, but I have no question whether it was right for me. I think that was because I was self-motivated, a beginner, and truly loved the work. It also helped to be someone who could reach out for support when I needed it. The staff at Coding Dojo were all very supportive but you had to ask for help in the first place. I would recommend them to anyone else, as long as they really wanted to be a web developer and were willing to put up with bumps in the road that come from a growing company that is willing to listen to feedback.

Also, I love coding because loving math and logic is so much a part of who I am. When I was little, I would get my parents to buy me math and logic books for fun, or as special Christmas presents. I would get my brother to teach me advanced topics, and then I would try to teach other kids. I like to think I’m good at it, but whether I am or not, I love it enough to keep working on it even when I struggle and that may be the same thing. If you’re reading this, wondering if you should be a coder, consider that for yourself. I think the quality that most makes me good at this work is that I hate unsolved problems and so I will work until I can solve it, even if that means stepping away but still thinking about it.

Finally, I have to say something related only to leaving California. Many times over the past couple months I have found myself overwhelmed by gratitude to the people who made this trip truly special. Despite being far from home and often lonely, I always knew there were people who would help me if I needed. More than that, my hosts in California went above and beyond to make me feel comfortable and at home and taken care of. Those I didn’t stay with often offered me rides, went out of their way to see me, and brightened up my lonely days with their company.  I feel so honored when I think of all the people I have connected with along the way, and inspired by the risks that each of them are taking to shape their lives. Goodbye California, and thank you for all that you have given me, and how you have helped me to become a more-recovered social worker.

P.S. Has anyone else seen the Virgin inflight safety video—the animation is so cool! Then they ruin it by making you watch ads for ten minutes.

It's the final countdown!

I'm going home on Saturday (that's four days from now). The song referenced by the title is going through my head. It's hard to appreciate being here sometimes when I'm so ready to be home.
This week, I'm working on my final project in Rails. Learning Ruby on Rails was particularly challenging because it has so many of its own rules, and because I'm pretty tired. I had no idea all of this information could fit into my brain. For my project, I'm making a "TaskMaster" to keep myself on track in the future as I keep learning to code.
Here's a page where you can see your goals--the idea is to accomplish one per day:

However, coding aside, I have been reflecting a lot on my time here. About five weeks ago, I felt like I was ready to go home. I'm glad I didn't. I've felt lonely a lot since coming here, but that loneliness has had the curious effect of opening me up and helping me to see the importance of the people around me. Thank you to everyone who has made this experience so meaningful (and I hope you know who you are). 

It has been interesting to watch myself in a new context and see how much of what has held me back in the past has been me and how much has been the circumstances I was in. If this experience has taught me anything, it is that when something in my life isn't working, I need to make a plan to change it, because it's not worth making myself miserable just hoping things will get better. Sometimes I imagine trying to explain to myself from six months ago how much better life would get, but I wouldn't have been able to imagine it then.

I spent years of my life counting down time to some imaginary moment when life would get better, and it didn't until I made it better. Now, as I count down the days until I return home, I am working on appreciating what I have here and being grateful for these few months, rather than focusing on where I am not. 

Problem solved!

Just now I solved a programming problem that I have been puzzling over all week, and I actually love my solution. Sadly, it's 11pm on the west coast, making it 2am on the east coast, so there's no one to tell but my blog. My therapy homework site is up and running:

As of five minutes ago it includes the ability to save your "worksheets", although you can't yet access them--that's next! Administrators (me) can add topics and questions on the site. Next up is being able to delete topics and questions, mostly because it's a hassle to do directly in the database.
On the screen is a topic that one of my classmates helped me create. It treats the serious problem of TMSS or Too Much Swag Syndrome, as defined by the urban dictionary. If you or your loved have been affected by TMSS, please seek help.
I may have failed a test today, partly because I panicked in the middle and felt confused by the directions. It felt really overwhelming afterwards, mostly because I just wanted to be at my home and instead was way out here. However, I wound up talking to other people in my program and being reminded that most of us at Coding Dojo feel this way--lonely, competitive, perfectionistic, scared of what comes next--to some degree, and are doing our best to manage that day by day. It's still fun and exciting and worth it, but that doesn't mean it's alway easy.

But what shall I call them?

I have been here over five weeks now! I will be going home in just three and a half weeks. I'm feeling very ready to go home. I would love to be doing the same work, but just returning to my apartment at the end of the day though. I moved over the weekend and it threw me off a bit, even though it's better since I have less of a commute.

This week we are working on our personal projects. I went through decision paralysis over the weekend about what to work on and eventually decided to go with an idea I had wireframed before beginning the program. It was originally called "The Digital Therapist" but I have since changed it to "Your Therapy Homework." I will probably change it again. The idea is that people can fill out therapeutic worksheets online, and save them. The long-term goal would be for therapists to be able to create their own worksheets. It's not super fancy but actually wound up being more complicated than I would have thought. Mostly the database was challenging because I wanted everything to be very easy to edit, and I wanted users to be able to save the worksheets they've done.

I spent yesterday on a "mock up" where I did all the HTML and CSS, and some Javascript. Now I am moving into a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework in CodeIgniter, and feeling very indecisive about naming my controllers. I realized I am giving myself a hard time for not being sure what to do, but I think the reason is that it's actually somewhat important and I want to make a good decision. I also have a tendency to perfect more than is healthy. I want this to end up being AMAZING when it is only my first project. I also enjoy thinking about organizational decisions. For example, if I name one controller "users" and one "worksheets" which controller leads to the worksheets that users save? My remote TA suggested "tags", "tasks", and "users", but I don't really know how to implement that.

I've been listening to Sandi Metz talk. I don't understand all of it yet, but it's a reminder that many of the things I'm thinking about are what "real" programmers (as in, not me yet) think about all the time. I get scared to break my lovely well-crafted programs, but I must in order to help them grow. We had a google Rails developer (from Wildfire) speak to us about Agile development, which is all about letting go of perfectionism. Time to try to implement this!

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...

Leaving DC, and out of sync videos in PhotoBooth

I am finally flying to the West coast! After a two hour delay, which left me pretty frustrated. I found myself getting anxious since it’s pretty clear we will miss our connection. However, I stopped myself to do a mental check list that went like this: “Will anyone die? Will you die? Is there anything you can do?” To which I answered: “Probably not”, “probably not”, “scream at the flight attendants? Oh wait, that’s just like when clients screamed at me over things completely out of my control.” For the record, I never scream at anyone, but I understand the temptation, as it is the only control you have in some situations. I wonder if that’s the purpose of flight attendants (and social workers for that matter)—to be the person people blame.
I’ve been working on my prep work for the past week. I was doing a Javascript tutorial through Codeacademy. I like Codeacademy for the constant positive reinforcement (we get a “Way to go!” message after every exercise), but it can get tedious, especially when it begins to feel like they are condescending to you by spelling out everything I should type step by step. Of course, then, if they stop doing that, I get angrier (why wouldn’t they tell me exactly what to type?). However, after I saw a job posting for a position where I would be helping nonprofits with CiviCRM and PHP, I found myself more energized to get through the class, so that I could go on to the PHP tutorial. Then I returned to some of my old Ruby problems and found that all that training had really helped me understand the fundamentals better. Okay, Codeacademy, you win.
This morning I spent a few hours recording an introductory video for my program. The few hours involved my recording about five practice videos (the first few of which, were me speaking for one minute, and then cutting myself off abruptly when I decided I hated it). I had a full video recorded, only to learn that the video and sound weren’t syncing up! I troubleshooted (troubleshot?) using this  Youtube video, and it worked! For the time it took me to record one “test” video, and then by the time I had recorded another video, the audio and video was off again. For anyone else encountering a similar problem in PhotoBooth, what worked for me was to record the video in iMovie instead. Then I posted my first YouTube video! I know, clearly I’m still living in 2004. (I actually don’t know when YouTube came out, but I do know that I learned about it from my grandmother, who described to me “a website where people put videos of themselves.” I recently heard a similar description of Vine as “an app where people record themselves brushing their teeth.”)
This is the view from my plane:

Whenever I get where I’m headed, at least there’s some nice scenery along the way.
By the time this is posted—I will have arrived somewhere.
Update: We are in Portland at last, after agreeing to fly to Seattle then renting a car and driving down. I am delirious with lack of sleep, but happy to be on the West coast at last.

My career shame

I love Brené Brown. I spent this morning listening to these two talks:
However, no matter how many times I watch her videos, I still don’t feel like I’ve truly internalized the message. Shame always trips me up. Last week I finished my job. This week I’ve been exhausted. It occurs to me that now, I have returned to a state I was trying to protect myself against. The shame of unemployment, or more accurately, of not having a salary. I spent the first four years of my life after college without a stable salary. This past year was the first time I had a salary and full benefits. It felt just as validating as I had always hoped it was. It removed a large source of anxiety from my life, both monetary and personal. However, as this blog mentions, I was not as happy as I had always thought I would be. Instead I was constantly drained, grouchy, and cried a lot. I considered quitting long before I did, but I knew I had to prove something to myself. I had to prove I could stick it out. I had to prove I could stick with something.
I don’t think many conversations about careers include the word shame, but they should. I always thought it was just me, but then isn’t that how shame operates? It keeps you from opening up to others or connecting through the messages of “You’re the only one who feels this way; no one else would understand; there’s something wrong with just you so don’t tell anyone; etc.” Even when I would hear my own fears echoed back by someone else, I would dismiss this as “it’s different for them, they had #{x} (where x is whatever job they had—my Ruby training says this looks better) job or internship before this so they don’t have to worry about finding a job like I do.” Then, the worse lie: “if I just get straight As, if I just do everything perfectly, if I never fail, then I won’t ever have to worry about this again.” So, I cried over every A minus, had a nervous breakdown over the one C I got, had anxiety attacks at my field placements, and annoyed my boyfriend at every turn, because I wouldn’t let him understand. Then, miracle of miracles, I got a job! I was not as happy as I thought, because I accepted the job, not from a place of worthiness but from a place of fear and insecurity. I assumed (wrongly, as it turns out) that they hired me because they would have hired anyone. I agreed to start earlier than I wanted to because I was so afraid of losing what I believed to be my one opportunity for gainful employment. I spent the year always looking over my shoulder, waiting for someone to tell me that I wasn’t good enough, and they don’t know how I managed to get hired. And despite knowing it wasn’t a good fit, I was scared to admit it out loud, for fear I would lose that which I had worked so hard to get.
Now, I’ve admitted it. I’ve left. And I am daily combating the fear that I will never get that again, and that I will never be a good enough programmer, and that I will fail again.

My last day

I am sitting on a Bolt Bus headed for New York. I have finished my last day at my agency. They've already changed my voicemail password! (Yes, I still tried to check my voicemail.) Earlier today, one of my clients cried when she realized it was my last day. We talked about her recent relapse, and people who had recently come into her life unexpectedly. I told her with a confidence I never could have had a year ago that I believed she was on a journey of healing, and that each set back was just a step along the way. I felt close to tears myself afterwards. I hope the same is true for me. Now I am working on a JavaScript tutorial for my bootcamp, which is fun, but far removed from the stories I've heard over the past three years. I hope I can find ways to touch lives as a programmer, even if I do not want to be "in the trenches" (as my supervisor referred to our job) anymore. My last week this quote was up on my board:

And so, I must remind myself, I have a non-specific, possibly-not-realistic dream of one day being a social worker programmer.
Speaking of which, I did already create a Ruby-based program for ABC thinking! It actually did cheer me up when I was at home sick one day, feeling bad for watching too much tv and eating too much junk food. I am trying to publish it to GitHub. I had figured out how to do that before, and now I can't remember! I thought I had an application, but it seems to have disappeared. Hopefully this forgetting won't be a trend, but I think it will all get easier when it is what I am doing all day long. Too much of my head has been taken up by client's phone numbers, birthdays, diagnoses, children's names, etc. I am excited to be making room up there for something new.

I love JavaScript buttons!

Are you having an awesome 4th of July?

Why am I afraid to promote my blog?

I can clearly remember being six years old and sitting in my elementary school bathroom thinking. I can see the concrete wall next to me and the metal stall divider on the other side, and hear the sound of the strange water faucet that sprayed in every direction. I was contemplating a question that recurred to me throughout my childhood and terrified me. It went something like this: What if everything people tell me is good about myself isn't really something in me, maybe it's just a combination of traits I inherited from my parents, good luck, and the conditions I was born into? At least, that is the thought I had as translated by my 27-year-old brain.
This memory flashed back into my mind while I've been reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg. She writes specifically about how women are more likely to think of their successes as due to luck or circumstance, while they often attribute failures to their innate flaws. She notes that men, meanwhile, often do the reverse. I've never been a man, so I can't comment on that, but I do know that I am well acquainted with what Sandberg calls the "imposter syndrome."
All throughout graduate school and my first job, my boyfriend was baffled by what he referred to as my insecurity. Before turning in every paper, before every test, and during every evaluation, the one common thread was my low self-evaluation, and panic over the failure I foresaw for myself.  In school, the closest I ever came to failure was a "C" on a test that I managed to turn into an "A" for the overall course. In life, the grades are less clear, which has made it harder.
I also feel frustrated by the mischaracterization (Blogger claims this is not a word--thoughts?) of the book's intent. My boyfriend sent me this article, which is well-written, but I do not get a feeling that the author actually read the book. The author first suggests that Sheryl Sandberg never refers to the supportive role of men in politics or at home, that she suggests women should be "emulating the egomania of the corporate male", and that she doesn't understand the struggles that most women face just to survive. Sandberg herself clarifies early and often in the book so far that this is exactly not what she is saying. Instead, the book uses simple and clear examples of how women could change the dynamic she sees in the workplace that often leaves women behind. (The diatribe against this article I have started has been edited.) I relate to Sandberg, and the women in her book, and as I read, I find myself encouraged, not to have to end up as COO of Facebook or to contrive my own "capitalist fantasy," but to feel confident in pursuing a life of personal and professional fulfillment, with a recognition of the societal barriers that I will have to face.
This comes full circle to my career, and this blog post. As a social worker, I have always been self-doubting and cautious. It took me two years of field placements and six months at my job until I felt comfortable identifying as a social worker. As a computer programmer, I feel like a complete fraud. I am always afraid of "real" computer programmers finding out about my ambitions, because I know I do not know what I am talking about. As a blogger, I wonder who could possibly want to read what I have written. And yet, I have already achieved more success than I could have imagined when I started this. I have been quoted, and in a sermon no less. I want to thank Rev. Dr. Mary Louise McCullough for this honor, and yet, even reading this fills me with an anxiety as I think that nothing else I write can possibly interest my readers. However, based on the advice given to me by a new colleague recently, I will celebrate this success, and enjoy it. I will lean in and promote my blog (as in, post it on Facebook--terrifying!).

A wedding, a girl scientist, and the rambling thoughts that along with them

I was in my brother's wedding this past weekend, which was one of the more meaningful experiences in my life. It was hard to watch my sibling do something so grown up, when I still feel so young myself. I am really proud of where my brother is in his life, and how my family has turned out. I'm not sure why this has been, but it feels like the last few years have brought a lot of healing. I wish it was my social worker prowess exerting itself, but I think that instead we have just been fortunate and had some happy accidents along the way. I credit the relationships both Dan and myself have formed as being a big part of that change, and am so grateful for how our family has expanded. Maybe I can develop a computer program that will fix families..(and solve world hunger, obviously).
Over the weekend, I found myself explaining my plans a lot, and to my surprise, everyone was both supportive and happy for me. I guess the hardest part of justifying this is actually convincing myself. Or I just have a great family.
Anyways, that's a long explanation for why I've been busy this past week, as I know my faithful readers (i.e. my dad) were just dying for another post.
I also wanted to plug an awesome project being done by a girl I met at a RailsGirls Meetup. They're trying to raise money by July to create short cartoons about a girl scientist. It is totally true that young women, especially women of color, need to be able to see themselves as mathematicians and scientists from an early age. I know that for me, I never realized the opportunities out there, and no one seemed to realize that I needed pushing in that direction. So, watch the video below, and check out the Indiegogo campaign if you're interested.

Meetup groups, Father's Day, and Superman

Yesterday I attended the third meeting of the group I started on Meetup for learning Ruby. I am really enjoying watching the group form and change, and I keep being struck with what a great idea Meetup is. When I first arrived at the library meeting room I had reserved (did you know you could do this for free at any DC Public Library? Just go here.), I was sitting there alone for the first 15 minutes. I felt a little embarrassed, and had to keep reminding myself that someone would show up, and also that no one cared if I was there all alone. Slowly people trickled in, and we wound up with five people, of whom I was the only girl.
It was nice that a couple were familiar faces, and I met new people too. I like hearing everyone's stories, though I have to admit, I feel shy about telling working developers about my plans to go to a bootcamp. So many developers are self-taught that I feel like a fraud going off to a camp. However, I know that this fits my learning style better and I am grateful that I have the resources and time to do this. Plus, I seem to be the only person judging myself for this, as most people ask me for more information about it to give to someone else in their life who wants to be a developer.
Anyways, we decided on a format to follow for the meetings, in which we would read books together and then discuss them each week. I made a conscious decision to let go of control of the group, because it's not about me, but about learning Ruby. I even allowed others to be organizers on Meetup! I think this is something being a social worker has taught me: how to let go of control of my creations and visions. I highly recommend starting or joining a Meetup group to anyone looking to enter a new field or community. All the Meetups I have attended have been very useful to me.
My biggest problem has become over-committing myself to events--I was supposed to go to one today but was too exhausted after running around all day yesterday. Instead I read old Superman comics on my computer and marveled at how I could access them with a short torrent download, when my dad (it's Father's Day after all) would have had to wait each week for a new one to be published then read each in a paper copy. I love technology. Happy Father's Day!

After writing this, I thought I should also relate a short anecdote from this meeting. While we were all talking, a man walked into the room. His tone was confrontational and my mental health instincts were on edge. He started asking about our group in a strange way, and it became clear he was drunk. I chose not to engage, because I didn't want to play social worker in my personal life and left it up to the others to handle it. One of the other members diverted him by pretending we had another meeting the next Sunday. The man told us the library wasn't open on Sundays and left the room, only to come back saying the fronk desk worker had confirmed this! The group member talking to him just reiterated that we were meeting next Sunday. He asked this man if he had a computer and the man replied "No, but I have a guitar...it's basically the same skill, right?"

Self Definition (a post written while falling asleep)

A wise self-conscious and awkward 17-year-old Maggie once said "If you define yourself too much, there's no way you can ever really change." Surprisingly, these words have been like a guiding light throughout my life, and if anything has defined me as an adult, it might be a lack of self-definition. That has allowed me a lot of flexibility in my career and life choices, but at times it has also left me feeling lost and ungrounded.
I thought of this tonight as I introduced myself at the RailsGirlsDC Meetup. I wasn't sure what to say about myself since I still feel like an imposter in the tech field (although after talking to others there last night I think there's a lot of people like me out there, and we all feel that way). More importantly though, I'm not sure I know what I'm doing yet or how to explain it. I am jumping into something without trying to define who I am becoming. As a social worker, I think I let that role define me too much, expecting that one day I would wake up as this awesome super social worker, who always knew the right thing to say and saved lives just by breathing. This time, I'm taking away those expectations of myself. I know there's a long road to become a great programmer, and that it is a destination that I will never fully reach, and I am much more comfortable with that than I was as a social worker.
Speaking of roles we play, I told a client and her caretakers today that I was leaving my position, and they reacted with more emotion than I expected. The woman I worked with most told me that she had come to see me as family and that my client had never had a more attentive case manager. I had to work very hard not to cry at that moment, since I had always felt like I was failing this client and her caretakers. I believed I had played the role of negligent social worker but they saw me as quite the opposite. In a way this goes back to where I started. When you define yourself, you often miss a lot of the picture. You never know how others are defining you, and if your definition is too rigid it is hard to hear how other people truly see you, or take steps to make changes in your life. I could say a lot on this topic so I may continue it in the future.
(But now I define myself as delirious with drowsiness so I will end this!)

You've been social worked!

Over the weekend I spent time learning how to build this:

"You've been social worked!"

In HTML, except I was trying to get the text on the image (it worked in other settings, just not in Blogger!). Then I got GIMP and just wrote the text on, except it won't save in a format recognizable as an image. (I'm sure there's a very easy way to do that, but I only had a little time after getting home and before dinner.) It was a fair amount of work for a simple output, but I enjoyed it.
My friend, Sara, and I came up with "You've been social worked!" as a saying. I think most of us social workers wish we could say it sometimes, rather than more commonly not really getting to see the effects of the work we do. I understand why we never hear someone say "It worked! I have been social worked indeed." It's very painful to tell someone how much they've helped, and honestly, for me at least, painful to hear someone tell you that you've helped them. That may seem strange but it's true.
When I left Polaris Project, we had a big lunch for the fellows to say goodbye to the clients. It was a moving experience but part way through it was too much. Many of the clients had cried. They brought gifts to us, that I felt very uncomfortable accepting, but would have felt even less comfortable returning to them. When they told me how much I had meant to them, I wanted to either say "I really didn't do anything" or burst out in tears. Neither was appropriate, but I'm not sure I handled it any better. I said thank you, but I doubt was very gracious. The relationships we build with our clients are so unique but yet strange that they can't really be summed up in one ceremonial goodbye or sentence or card. 
However, as I begin termination at my current job, I can't help wishing I could wrap it all up by striking a pose and saying: "You've been social worked!"

Contemplating Recovery

I have four weeks left at my job, and seven weeks until I start Coding Dojo bootcamp. After working as a social worker for three years, it's hard for me to imagine a work environment where I do not talk to people all day. It has sounded like heaven many times in the past few years, but I also worry I will get bored and restless. Of course I have many questions about this decision. Will it make me happy? Will I miss social work? Will I find meaning in my work?
However, I am trying to remember what I have learned over the past few years: there is no shortcut to meaning and happiness. I am doing this because I want to find more balance in my life and because I enjoy coding. After years of pushing myself along in a career and trying to make it fit, this one feels like it will. That doesn't mean that any developer job will do. I will still have to look for the right work environment, preferably at a company that shares my values. This may also be a time for me to consider what my values are.
The more basic and practical questions, of course, come first. Will I learn what I need to learn in this program? Will I be good at this? Unfortunately those are hard to answer before starting out. I have done plenty of research on Coding Dojo, and everything I've read makes me feel like I will learn a lot. I want to learn how to take my very basic algorithms and turn them into real programs that can be run on the web or other devices. I already built a short and basic CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) program in Ruby, although I don't want to always be building counseling applications. I've been a social worker for so long it will take me some time to learn how to develop the rest of myself.

Making the decision

Three years ago, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted for my career. I was gearing up to get my Master's in Social Work, and believed I would go out and therapize the world into happiness. It took me three years to admit I was wrong. Throughout graduate school I had doubts, but thought it was my usual wanderlust so I pushed on.
Then I graduated, with a job offer in hand. I took my licensing exam two weeks after my last class, and two weeks after that I started my job at a community mental health agency. The first day, I sat down across from a woman who told me that she wanted was to quit crack cocaine but couldn't talk about it because of "the pain." It was the moment I had dreamed about before setting out to graduate school, and I didn't handle it too poorly. Over the next few months, I had many such moments. But I wasn't happy. I came home every night cranky and tired.
After a year at that job, I took two weeks to give myself a break from my constant doubting and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. That's when I started teaching myself coding. I found that it gave me energy in a way that social work never had. It felt like I was doing math problems again. I started dreaming of a career in computer programming and researching how to accomplish that. I found various coding bootcamps, but I kept getting drawn back to Coding Dojo. One evening I came home from work and called them with my questions. The guy who answered the phone was very helpful and suggested I apply. Within a day I had an interview scheduled. By the following Monday, I had been accepted and had to decide if I would attend. After a lot of internal back and forth, I went with my gut and accepted. After that, the pieces began falling into place, where I found a place to stay, I realized it wouldn't be nearly such a financial stretch, and I had the support of my boyfriend, and all my friends and family. Now, all that remains is finishing my job and leaving.