On September 12, I turned 35 and started a web development course at Perpetual Education to pursue a skill I always thought was too difficult for me.
My mother always said your 30s are the best time in a person’s life. My decade so far has brought me my highest highs and lowest lows, and those lows are what gave me the momentum to change.
In May of 2021, my father passed away. It was both a long time coming and a total surprise. It’s an event you know will scare you, yet it’s still more traumatizing than you imagined. It made me think, what’s the point of living? Do we exist only to stop existing? It made me think about how I want to spend the days and hours between now and when I or my next loved one ceases to exist.
Nothing changed immediately. Sometimes revelations need to take time to grow roots.
It took months, but over the course of that year, I realized a few things:
I was unhappy and felt hopeless.
I needed to prioritize my health and happiness.
I needed to pursue a career I felt proud of and enjoyed.
It’s tough to convey this story accurately without making this the length of a novel. It essentially boils down to this: I needed change.
I admitted to myself I was struggling to run a business and with my studies at The Academy for Dog Trainers. I need to prioritize my mental health and pursue figuring out what was wrong. I had long suspected I had ADHD like many of my other siblings. I started seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist, who confirmed my diagnosis. After getting treatment, my world drastically changed.
It’s strange to realize your normal isn’t normal in your 30s. I suddenly found myself redefining fear or frustration as focus. Many of the tasks I never could manage suddenly were manageable. My dreams had always been limited by what I thought I could do, and that definition had expanded. If I could pursue anything, what did I want?
Around March 2022, I decided to stop pursuing a career in dog training, and I closed my pet services business. I am privileged enough that I could get by just fine for a few months on limited work and allow myself to explore new paths. I didn’t want to jump from the pan into the fire. I wanted to pursue a career because it was something I wanted, not because I didn’t want certain kinds of stress or feared never working again.
One of those paths was coding. Why did I think I could code? Well, I built an invoice generator because I didn’t want to write 4 invoices a month and had spent way too many hours tweaking my business website because I enjoyed it. I knew too many people who had been burned by the quality of the education at Bootcamps. If I was going to pursue coding, I wanted to choose the program carefully. I had spent a year learning to understand how to work and build systems around my limits caused by ADHD, and that meant I was happier and more productive than I had ever been. I wanted a program that could be flexible with those limits, had high engagement, offered content in multiple formats, understood education is measured by how well all students learn, and invited collaboration from students when they couldn’t grasp the material. I searched through BootCamp after BootCamp and struggled to separate marketing from reality. The vetting process was overwhelming. Thanks to a single comment by a student career Karma, I found Perpetual Education. Now I am learning to code for the web. I didn’t think I could do this a year ago, yet here I am. My days are so different but also incredibly fun. Logging into PE’s website was the best way to welcome year 35.
I really enjoyed reading this, Alina. I'm so sorry to hear about your dad - I wish that your revelation could have come in a different way. I'm glad we're on this journey together, though!
We're so happy that you found Marco's comment and that it led you to PE. : )