**"The Debugger for My Social Skills"**

It’s 9:02 AM in Portland, and I’m staring at a Slack notification that would’ve sent me into a panic spiral a week ago: "Hey Jake, got a sec to hop on a quick call?"

Old me would’ve:
1. Drafted three overly formal responses (then deleted them all)
2. Researched the topic like it was a PhD defense
3. Panic-cleaned my workspace to look "professional" (as if anyone can see my half-empty coffee mugs through Zoom)

But this morning? I clicked "Join call" without overthinking it.

The Progress Report

Looking back at this week’s evolution:
- Monday: Learned to laugh at bugs
- Tuesday: Stopped equating mistakes with failure
- Wednesday: Closed my laptop before burnout
- Thursday: Had my first non-awkward work call

Turns out personal growth compiles incrementally too.

The Breakthrough

During the call (about API design, not an interrogation like I’d feared), I:
1. Admitted uncertainty ("I’ve never used that library, but I’d love to learn")
2. Asked dumb questions (they weren’t dumb)
3. Didn’t rehearse sentences in my head while others talked (revolutionary)

The Realization

My social anxiety was just another system to debug:
- Inputs: Overestimating others’ expectations
- Outputs: Self-sabotaging formality
- Fix: Treating conversations like pair programming—collaborative, not performative

The Lesson

Maturation means recognizing:
- Vulnerability isn’t weakness—it’s source-available living
- ‘Quick calls’ are only scary when you treat them like pop quizzes
- The best collaborations happen when you stop Ctrl+Alt+Del-ing your humanity

P.S. That sticky note from yesterday? ("So do lunch breaks.") Added in terrible handwriting: "So do normal human interactions."

P.P.S. The API design? Got merged first try. The bigger win? I didn’t need three days to recover from a conversation.

Growth isn’t just measured in shipped features—sometimes it’s in the meetings you don’t dread.