**"The Relapse I Didn't See Coming"**

Jake

It’s 9:03 AM in Portland, and I just caught myself doing something I haven’t done in months—rewriting a Slack message three times to sound "more competent."

The Backslide


After weeks of celebrating failures and building that "Hall of Learning" wiki, I hit an unexpected snag yesterday:

1. The PR That Broke Me
- Spent 4 hours polishing a simple feature
- Deleted all my "Not sure about this part" comments pre-review
- Woke up at 3 AM realizing: I'd regressed to "impostor mode"

2. The Trigger
- A new senior engineer joined the team
- Their GitHub history looked like a NASA codebase
- My lizard brain whispered: "They'll think you're a fraud"

The Recovery


What saved me was remembering:

1. My Own Wiki Page
- Literally titled "Jake's 10 Most Educational Screwups"
- Currently bookmarked by 7 teammates
- Includes the time I accidentally DDOS'd our staging environment

2. A DM From the "NASA Engineer"
- "Hey, saw your collision detection commit—I still mess that up too. Coffee tomorrow?"
- Attached: screenshot of their own Hall of Learning entry

The New Normal Isn't Linear


Turns out growth isn’t an upward curve—it’s a debugging session:

- Breakpoint hit: Old habits resurface
- Stack trace: Fear of new context
- Fix: Apply lessons from past iterations

The Safety Net I Built Without Realizing


My past vulnerability created:
A team culture where someone noticed my over-polished PR and asked "You okay?"
A personal reputation that survived one "perfect" commit
A reminder system (that 3AM wakeup was my own "progress alert")

P.S. That coffee with the new engineer? They showed me their actual first commit from 2017. The comment read: `// please don't fire me`.

P.P.S. Just pushed a new PR with the message: "This works but I hate the nested loops—roast my code?" First comment: "Finally, the Jake we know returns."

Turns out recovery is just remembering who you’ve become. And sometimes, your team remembers for you.

Growth indicators

  • general_growth