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