Long story short, I currently (still) don’t have a job but while on my new ADHD medicine, I’ve been feeling confident enough to talk to some people about jobs… and failing to deliver on all accounts. The last I had was a person I met accidentally while on one of the meet-ups in the city (I live in the countryside; no job/no jobs circle kind of a thing) and it all went well for a while - I gave him my phone number and e-mail, in a week he called me asking for whether I’m interested in doing front-end web-dev work for him (I have a huge HTML5 sticker on my laptop); I thought, hey, I can do this.
Whoops.
He asked me about any portfolio I might have, but since the perfectionist in me was really not thinking much of the code I had for my static-site generated personal website (Gulp, LESS, Jade, Babel, so on) I had taken it down at the time and was in the middle of doing a rewrite. Hey, I thought, I’ll wrap up my rewrite, submit what I have, send him the links.
Whoops.
It did not happen. I failed to meet the self-imposed deadline – guess I just work extremely slow by any sane standards. I eventually gave up and got really depressed; the rewrite is about 90% finished, but now I think that is really crap too, so going to build something different next, I guess. I’ve been working on small scene in Three.js (just 250 lines of TypeScript for the main thing) and it’s consumed my last two weeks - again, working super slowly - and my phone ended up breaking down somewhere between then and now, and I never ended up calling him back, nor do I have the number now. And it’s so late for any of that anyway. I feel like shit.
Damn.
I’ve been trying to build up some credit by doing community tasks for the meet-up organizers; implementing features for the community website (we’re on GitHub) and so on, but I’m afraid going like this - taking on opportunities I think I can deliver on but in reality, can’t or just fail to, is ruining all the progress I’ve made. It’s been like this for several times in a row… what the heck do I do? Get quiet, stop going to the meet-ups? I dread the next one, after the Christmas break, as I might run into that person if he’s around. For the better or worse. I just dread it. Do I keep quiet and practice because, seriously, I’m just not good enough? I don’t know any more.
What can I do to remedy this?
P.S. I feel that going for nearly a year learning web-dev and still being jobless is kind of “marking me” as a failure too. There’s that too. Part of me wants to start everything from scratch, but I’m afraid I can’t.