I believe everyone undergoes traumatic experiences either once in their lifetime or regularly I'll share one such experience and how that possibly created a huge impact in my life
The urge
Right from my childhood, I've not had many close ones who have stayed altogether with me (except family). I was kind of an ambivert sometimes I never talk or sometimes I never stop talking. With so much going on in the world for the past two-plus years in the pandemic so many lost their family and their loved ones. I think I just lost one such person in 2021.
If You Don't Ask,
the Answer Is Always No
I'd always tell my close circle of friends to always try before we'd fail because it is better to ask and fail rather than fail on our terms. Thus I had the urge of asking why this happened to me? The answer I got was something I expected + didn't expect which turned the entire last three months of 2021 bizarre. It still has a lot of impact on me (Not sure how I'd overcome this though). But how did this change me?
Would you believe if I told I changed my work location and even the company I was working for in order to divert myself from memories about the lost one?. I have so much memories of the person in the company although she never worked there. It was all about the days when I used to get messages/call from the person. I could relate every memory to my work triggering old memories that would make me feel very bad. Thankfully I had wonderful people who were kind enough to understand what I was going through and used to help out when in need.
Channeling energy
If there is something I do very much in my life other than spending time with close friends and chatting is coding. When I was going through tough times, I was unable to sleep accepting what had happened to me.
I'd barely sleep around 3 to 4 hours but still end up waking mid-sleep. All my schedules were shattered since I did not have proper sleep. My face was so dull with dark circles. When I went out people would easily spot that I was so tired just by looking at my face. I was not able to concentrate on anything.
I have never experienced something like this in my entire life and pray anyone else won't go through such times. Staying awake was the only thing I could barely do. To forget what had happened I wanted to do something that could make me forget things easier but it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. I started my first Open Source contribution on one such day.
With my eyes filled with tears, I raised this change as pull request. but to my surprise, this got merged so faster than I had imagined. I was crying and feeling happy at the same time. Now I knew what had to be done and started figuring out things that were broken in the site and started fixing things one by one. I'd send at least one change per day to keep my thoughts positive and as days crossed I started to understand the complete flow of how the beta.reactjs.org site worked.
Once Dan Abramov had posted an AMA(Ask Me Anything) on his Twitter and I collected all my courage thinking the worst he could say was no and asked him this.
And to my surprise we were in a short conversation and I became a maintainer of the official reactjs docs repo.
I never talked about these incidents to anyone since I did not want to blame anyone for what had happened to me. I think it was solely my bad decisions that took me to this phase. I wish to not talk about these either! I've seen people blaming for what had happened to them and how they are still stuck with it. Its fine we don't grow in a day it takes time. But make sure you relate a good memory with a traumatic memory so that you don't feel sad about it but you have mixed feelings on them.
Takeaways
- If You Don't Ask, the Answer Is Always No
- Be generous to others it will come to you in a better way
- If you wish for something don't stop from making it yours or don't wish for it at all!
Be kind to people as always :)