The Bloggin and Me blog post by Ana is an insightful and fun read. She writes about a lot of topics that not many people want to talk about like personal fears and life problems, but she does it in a very relaxed style with some jokes. I like to read about others people’s life because sometimes I find that I’m not very different to others and I can relate a lot of their thoughts and experiences to mine.

I can imagine how she felt when she stopped having fun for working and earning money. I’ve always been very curious about technology, science and engineering since I was a kid, I liked to be creative, build stuff, experiment with new knowledge and have fun doing anything non-school related. I liked to challenge myself and discover or learn new things along the way. However, I stopped feeling like that since my mid years in college. Now, I rarely feel like I want to do something new and interesting, I don’t feel that fresh inspiration that pushes me to try something new or stupid or just fun. I know is not that I don’t have time, I have a lot of free time, I just don’t feel like that anymore. I spent most of my free time playing video games or watching series, tired, maybe thinking about the next assignment, the next exam, the grades or that I should sleep more. Now I see those fun activities as a waste of time and unproductive, but then I proceed to do something even less productive or worst, less fulfilling. Perhaps I’m burned out by school, I’m forced to think that I should spend my free time doing productive stuff to be more competent in my area, but that thinking makes me get tired quicker, more stressed and with the constant and unfulfilled desire to rest. I feel like when I was younger when I do challenging homework that pushes me to be creative, but each time is harder to find the right spot of time to start the work and put a decent amount of thinking to it. I mostly do homework to finish it, not to learn from it, hardly I sit and take my time, I don’t have fun anymore, and that is sad.

It is very inspiring how she quickly started to make conscience about her own thoughts and feelings to start working over them. She realized that a lot of people around her were toxic, and that most of her fears were a common occurrence among the developer community. In her words «Your fears are part of who you are and use them to your benefit». This line made me think about a conference where Jürgen Klaric talked about fear, and how fear forges our experience as human being. Fear is good because it saves us from apparent danger, it’s an instinct that is hard to avoid and very natural to follow. But fear is what stop us from doing more and better things with our lifes. He mentioned that eliminating our fears is impossible, fear is always going to be there to warn us, we cannot avoid it nor eliminate it, but we can learn to take advantage of it by understanding it.

At the end she mentions the personal benefits of having a space for you in your blog, more that doing it for someone else, is doing it for you. I think that having a space just for me and my silly thoughts, record my new learning or posting any content would very nice to have, but I just don’t find the motivation to do it. I hope that somewhere in the near future I can get healed from this weird mental illness and finally enjoy life as I used to, without worrying about grades, without worrying about how much I earn, without worrying about how «productive» I am and without worrying about what everyone else thinks of me. I think that maybe giving me the space to write a blog about anything could work as meditation and a relaxation activity. Maybe I could try it in the future when I’m done with the semester. I’m of course doing what I can to enjoy every second of my life and my beautiful student life, but is still hard sometimes to get out of the comfort zone and have enough energy to do something for myself.