How I felt over the past week.

Gotta say, the remaining days of the past week was nothing but quite a slumber. My optimism waned, negative thoughts started emerging and for many times I thought that I could no longer control my emotions and thoughts.

At many nights I struggled to write a single word, either because there's too much going inside or outside of my mind. I was demotivated to the point that I watched YouTube for most of the afternoon and lost interest in exercising.

All of them happened for little to no reason. I honestly couldn't remember if it's because of my hormonal changes or something else.

But one thing I knew for sure is that there's nothing much happening for the past week. And that made me a bit sullen about my life progress.

Nothing much happened last week.

My freelance business sees fewer and fewer clients each month, and you couldn't do anything else but prepare for the next interview.

That prevented me from pursuing side hustles and hunting for other jobs :(

What makes this situation even trickier is when intrusive thoughts and other distractions keep getting in your way of studying and learning. Including my pesky mom who constantly breaks into your room to get stuff.

I've spent the past few days trying to come up with coping skills to make my work time less choppy and more efficient, and to train my focus to something for a longer period of time.

Because the first job interview went through splendidly, now I have my sights on the last interview, which will be more difficult than the first ( because it's a technical interview in which you may do coding tests ).

Preparing for the job interview ahead almost became my full time job. I never imagined how stressful I'd be until I hopped on the coding interview questions.

It demanded my entire reserve of mental energy and attention span, and even more frustratingly, there are days when I kept screwing up midway for said reasons above.

The sacrifice was getting more realistic when I kept feeling sleepy after trying to solve a coding problem for too long, or that I kept falling back to my old patterns when things don't go the way you wanted.

This really is one of the few moments where I still doubt about my skills even after having achieved some form of success.

I gotta admit, its' really the nature of working as a tech professional - coding interviews were the rite of passage if you want to work for big grands and for big companies. But I heard rumors that even smaller or mid-sized companies used such hiring tactic to weed out candidates. Just like how impractical college entrance tests were used to filter out "undesirable" applicants.

Many times I wondered if my new job was as unrelentingly strict on meeting deadlines as I am to my personal work.

In all seriousness, things around me have changed a lot, except for some of my mental challenges.

Boredom really led me to weird places

Watching a documentary about life of Buddhist monks inspires me to become comfortable with whatever thoughts that arise, and the negative feelings that cloud your mind.

The essence of meditation and chanting is to get yourself into a state of subdued but heightened consciousness, in other words, getting into "trance state" or "the zone".

While that helps a lot with concentrating during those intense hours on the code editor, but it didn't really offer much in terms of positivity. Positivity is something you give yourself no matter what you do. 

Boredom was supposed to enrich my empty soul with creativity and inspiration, but instead, the intrusive thoughts came flooding my senses and at the end of the day I felt like my self esteem has come under siege. Inarguably this was a shameful and confusing experience.

When I rethought about it hard enough, I realized that I became a bit hard on myself at times. Whenever I mentally complimented myself for being smart, or being in a positive state for too long, my brain would send fear signals that I'm about to experience a mood-changing and debilitating thought.

I hate to reeducate myself again and again that most of my irrational worries came from the excessive need to control.

As well as the underlying fear that I make a fool out of myself or do something inappropriate whenever an unwanted thought or nervous reaction come up.

Instead of falling for the same way of thinking, I chose to acknowledge those bad thoughts and emotions to come up, and finally convinced myself that I don't need to put everything under my control.

Sometimes the excessive control causes fear that I might run off course. And that same fear will cause even more of those thoughts to come back.

By understanding that kind of fear, it would affect me less. I don't have to be the best person every single second.

If this sounds familiar, I might be suffering the legacy of years of self help indoctrination.