This is a post from my blog My Web Development Odyssey
This post highlights one of the other purposes of this blog. And that’s how mental illness, in this particular instance, depression, can affect learning. I’ve dealt with depression the majority of my life. My latest round of depression has been ongoing for a few years and peaked last fall. I began feeling better in December of last year and January this year.
I attribute learning web development as one of the factors that helped me get out of that dark place I was in. However, since about five weeks ago I’ve begun to slip a little. Less motivation and less clear goals. When it gets bad I begin to feel hopeless and helpless. Doing dishes, taking out the trash, or balancing a budget are tasks I can’t wrap my head around. Learning a complex subject like web development is next to impossible. It’s still nowhere near the peak as it was late last year, and I’m fighting hard to make sure it doesn’t.
I began noticing that my motivation for learning JavaScript was declining. I’m unsure though, if that was due to depression or the fact that I seem to be slightly stumped by higher order functions and functional programming. That could be causing my depression to worsen. Which caused which? The “being stumped” causing my worsening depression or the depression causing my lack of motivation and clarity to learn? In reality, it’s likely a combination of both.
Whatever the origin, I’ve not posted as soon as I had hoped. This blog was born not to long ago, and I intend for it to have a long and healthy life. And that might mean on occasion to explain how mental illness and life gets in the way of our best intentions.
Life can be messy, but we can get on top things again. So what if we need to kick, claw, and scream our way out of whatever life’s strife may hurtle our way. Fight with all our might. We can do this!
Here are a few things I’m working on. I hope to have a first version of my anticipated timeline of learning web dev soon using my Aeon Timeline app. You will be able to interact with it on my web page to examine more details. I’m looking forward to posting that soon. I hope to see you there.
I recently purchased NodeJS – The Complete Guide (incl. MVC, REST APIs, GraphQL by Maximilian Schwarzmüller from Udemy. I like visual learning and Max likes to show graphs and diagrams. He’s also very enthusiastic. I look forward to finishing this course and also his React course. Using Gimp I will attempt to create a custom logo for my blog!
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