Growth
When I was a kid, I wanted to learn almost everything. theology, physics, chemistry, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, not as curiosity for curiosity’s sake, but as a genuine orientation. I was drawn toward knowledge as a category, not toward any subject inside it. I wanted to understand how things worked, and I wanted to understand how they related to each other.
The problem was the people around me. not their fault, but they were the evidence I kept looking at. no one I could see excelled at all of it. not even close. the picture the world was showing me was that you pick a lane, you go deep, and that depth is where the results live. every system I was in, school, university, the way people talked about careers, rewarded the vertical. the specialist. the one who knows one thing completely. and I was not that. I was the one who kept moving horizontally, touching everything, carrying a general picture without owning any particular depth yet.
Almost everyone can build a machine learning model now. you can prompt your way into a working pipeline in a matter of five minutes. building a model is not the problem, optimizing it is, understanding how and what it is doing are two completely different things, and that gap becomes very visible the moment you step into a competition.
I spent time participating in competitions on Kaggle and Zindi , joining teams, reading solutions, watching people work. and the pattern I kept seeing was the same: build a baseline, iterate, submit, repeat, and that’s fine, that’s how it works, but without ever asking why the iteration was moving in a particular direction. not having a compass. is what mostly happen. the leaderboard becomes the only signal, and you start optimizing for a number without understanding what the number means. that’s not learning. that’s just another form of guessing.
My earliest memory of a real community is 249 Unit, a video editing group I joined in 2018, when I was around fifteen. I don’t remember how I found it. I only remember the texture of being inside it: the average age was seventeen, a few outliers in their early twenties, and the whole thing had the specific energy that comes when people are young and making things together before anyone is doing it for money.
You were taught, somewhere along the way, that needing people was a liability. maybe no one said it out loud. maybe life just kept rewarding you every time you didn’t need anyone, every time you endured alone what others fell apart over, every time you moved on from something that should have broken you and didn’t. the lesson compounded, without you knowing: detachment works. self sufficiency works. you are the proof.
I have had this realization, knowing I almost ruined all my relationships. my childhood, teenage years and early twenties are all lessons of detachment and isolation, and I kind of never been hungry for relationships although I wasn’t so fully into them either, and that paradox was what confused me. that all this independence should lead to some desire of feeling what it’s like to feel the dependence you would feel in all sorts of relationships, all this alone time means I might need at least one loyal friend who I would need to talk to about everything. and it really isn’t that strange, but this was another form of walking contradiction. it confused me, but not that much. attributing factors worked as explanations, I might be fulfilled with the close circle I have, and indeed I have a very small circle where I’m fulfilled with life, satisfied mentally, intellectually and emotionally. my very few friends and family are all I need so I don’t look outside. but then also I shouldn’t cheapen bonding myself with others this much, and I wasn’t, I was genuinely fine in forming healthy relationships with others, but it was so messy. not the kind of messy that comes from a dynamic relationship, but in the mechanism I had of making new ones and then when I realized all the things that were holding me back from maintaining and establishing new relationships in my life, it was because of being emotionally detached.
There are things I carry that I never stop to examine. Experiences I walked through on autopilot, with enough presence to function but not enough to remember . GDSC was one of them. It has been almost two years since I left, and this is the first time I am actually stopping. maybe subconsciously I was avoiding it, maybe the experience was painful in a way that needed distance. or at least that what I thought back then, but mostly it is because I have a self pattern of moving forward and forgetting to look back, and this is me deliberately breaking it, for once.