It has been an year or more since my last journal entry, and a lot has changed since then. It has been really tough writing this entry as well, due to the lack of things happening but also the sheer scale of feelings I have about this time period. I transitioned from school to college, from a well known capital city to a much smaller one across the country and from a forest of github contributions, to.... almost nothing (to the point one of my best friends had to message me out of concern).
I ended my previous journal on a really high note, but to be really honest, my original plans have derailed a lot more than I would like to admit. Over this one year, one realisation that I hit while deep in thought was that your envrionment, especially your peer circle, no matter how much you try to isolate yourself, will have an impact on you. The feeling of seeing people around you, unmotivated, with no definite goals, with no ambition when it comes to the subject they will study for the next 4 years will slowly detoriate you as well. Back at home, I had friends like rex and nisarga with whom I used to talk both online and offline. Some of the most talented people I have ever met, and just talking to them daily kept me in the zone for programming. In my peak time for competitive exams, I was still pushing out 100+ commits a month on my personal projects. The programmer in me was in an all time high, and it worked well enough to kickstart my dream for indie game dev and even an internship.
But it is really hard when you already are really really ahead of most of them, not just the people in your year, but your seniors too. You have no one to look up to in the offline world and no one to keep interesting conversations with. Even the people you would expect to know about the most, people with roles in computer science clubs, fall flat and ride the ai website builder hype cycle. I always am very careful when managing the people I let into my social circles, to gatekeep my environment, but for the first 6 weeks of college, that resulted in NO one being in my social circle. In my very small experience as a 18 year old, soltitude is somewhat of a double edged sword<?> It gives you some time, some time to address whatever feelings that brew inside. It does give you time to self reflect. On the other hand, having thoughts in soltitude, with no one to keep them in check does lead to delusions. This was also the time preiod when university assignments hit me like a truck from behind and I started appearing online lesser, which was a really big mistake because that was the only place where I had a really good social circle, of people I looked up to and people I wanted to become like. This really just took away my time and the motivation to program. It felt like walking a foggy path with no torch or a compass. The child in me felt like I was falling behind, and the melancholic middle aged drunk man was taking over.
February, 2026, fed up with being in a society I do not mix well with, I pick up a blunt pencil and a rough copy and I start to just draw. This slowly spiralled into me taking an official hiatus from programming, and discovering a new hobby of art. I felt the same way I used to feel when I was making my own html pages years ago. I started from the fundamentals, the boxes, to plants to animals to now well anime girls mostly. I intend to post my digital art here. I spent hours a day leanring to draw and it was the most refreshing thing I had ever done, almost like a lifeline, an another self for me to wander through, another road to take, even if its less travelled by. I become friends with someone who was good at art and since I finally found someone who was better than me at something, he became my first target to beat. The artist in me was brewing, and was showing no intentions to stop anytime soon.
At the same time, around March, I took another decision, I decided that I want to get fit, I have been overweight since childhood, and I wanted to put an end to it. I started to hit the gym, tried to my best to diet despite the horrendous carbslop fed to us in hostels. By the time of writing this, I have lost ~20lbs and the goal is to lose ~20 more. It is also the same time I started to pick up reading as well, reading small novels like Animal Farm to get back into the habit of reading. You do get a lot of looks and comments from the cattle, wondering why would you pick up drawing at such late age, or why bother on fitness this much, or even why read anything other than the course. One thing, that I have perfectly done from a long time is to stop worrying about other people’s opinion of myself. Overthinking what might people think are just imaginary shackles confining me from the Ultimate Greatness™. The literary fitness freak inside me was looking to pick me up and improve myself.
May 2026, I'm back home for a month. I have found a little motivation to start work again on my indie dev dream. With the added ability to draw some basic stuff, it has been fun creating character concepts and think about worldbuilding and lore. I also started reworking my metroidvania/platformer template from scratch. The programmer in me is beating again.
1this was a huge piece for me.
2and i was debating for a long time to whether write it or not.
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5thanks to that one relative who unknowingly gave me a little boost
6to write this.