Man!!!, If I am to summarize my year using one word or reaction, it would be Mannn!!! because the year had me screaming that over and over again.
My biggest wins and losses both came this year. I think I would try to make this shorter than my 2020 review but lets see how this goes (I wrote a story book in that review 😂).
I initially wrote a month by month review on how my 2021 went but I felt it would be boring to read so I decided to summarize it in this one.
Before I go about screaming about what I did this year, lemme talk about how I started the year.
By January 2021, I was partially unemployed, I got an offer to join a fintech start up late january and I started working with them by February. I mainly took the offer because it was better than being unemployed and I really wanted to gain the fintech experience. This was probably the best decision I made this year. I chose experience over pay.
Now, I would go ahead and list my losses this year. I would seperate them in three parts (Mentally, Career wise and Socially).
Losses 😭
Mentally
I started the year in a terrible state, I was struggling with some personal ish (yeah, quite personal). The whole Endsars thing fucked me up, then I was struggling with figuring out what I wanted to do with my career. Impostor syndrome was hitting me soo haard.
I felt like I had lost all my friends, the only person I had with me wasn't in the position to be there for me at that time for reasons beyond our power. It was then I realized how lonely I was.
I saw a friendship/love relationship tear apart and this messed me up big time.
I ran from home ( I actually went on my knees begging to leave, lol) to Ife just so I could be alone, locked myself indoors for days and lied to people I wasn't around yet so I don't get to see some people.
I remember one Friday when I was at mosque waiting for someone and I hid behind a tree because I was shaking after seeing so many people. I just wanted to be alone.
I began to Stammer sometimes and my hands began to shake uncontrollably so I bought a Rubic cube and fidget spinner hoping it would help (I think my hands are great now).
Career
I got sacked from three different companies/start-up this year. I don't think any of them were because I was incompetent though.
There was a time I felt I earned far less than my worth, could barely pay by bills but I had no choice.
Got to the final stages of 3 interviews but lost them all.
I ended up taking too many jobs because I needed to pay my bills so bad, there were times I was working 4 jobs at a time and it messed me up big time.
Socially
- Started ignoring conversations at the beginning of the year, especially after switching off my read receipt
- Deleted a couple of numbers, muted statuses, archived chats, switched off notifications from social media apps. The notifications were making me feel anxious.
WINS 🤩
Well, as much as the year started a bit rocky, it wasn't all tears and struggles. I had a couple of wins.
Mentally
I kinda said fuck it and fuck you to many people I felt I had no reason to be reaching out to regularly and it helped
Twitter is a wild space so I started tweeting to myself alone and somehow, twitter algorithm hardly brings stupid tweets to my TL. Just football, brezz, tech, music and sarcasm.
You need to know the excitement when your mum calls you because you either bought her a gift or sent her something. The prayers and joy. My God
I tried to take care of myself more by buying myself things I felt would make my life or work easier or would make me look better. Wanna see my perfume collection 🌚 ??
Career wise
- I got a new laptop, a MacBook Pro 2020 (M1)
- Crazy but I joined the total of 6 companies this year, though I got sacked from 3.. lol
- I started applying for senior roles and for the first time ever, I was getting responses.
- I learnt a bit about the Fintech ecosystem and remained in that ecosystem.
- I got more familiar and comfortable with tools I had only read about before, one big example is Typescript and NestJS.
- I started writing better code as I was now working with other people on the same codebase.
- I started making key decisions which would affect the product the company was building positively. It made me realise how smart of a person I was
- And finally, I ended the year with a job offer from a YC Backed Fintech Start up in Nigeria with a pay (xx) times the salary I started the year with (ma koba mi). It happens to be a "senior backend engineer" role according to the job posting.
Socially
I want to believe that my biggest wins this year comes from my social life.
I spent more time with my male friends this year and it made me realize the importance of male friendships. My closest friend Abdulmalik happens to be the reason I stay sane. I might have gone crazy without him around me. I have other male friends who came around regularly like Nifemi, Olumide, Fawaz, Adroit, Tofunmi, Lekan, Oseh and anyone I might have forgotten. Olamide Samuel and Dara deserve special shout out too as they were the ones who believed in me and my career growth. Dara is probably tired of my rants and cries already lol.
One thing I tried to do this year is making my friends happy. I went out on friendship dates, bought my friends gifts, sent a couple of unanonymous gifts to other people using vendors who were my friends too. I also tried to be there for my developer friends who were finding their feet in the field. Special shoutout to Olamidun for inspiring me with his growth.
Another thing I want to mention is, there are a couple of people you look up to in the field and I also have mine. The main names are Eri, Sogo, Falola and Hashcode; they have all helped me in anyway they could. Special shoutout to Bright for giving me a chance and space to grow.
I really can't list them all but you all were amazing.
I am glad this year happened and ended this way. Best year so far.
2022 is definitely gonna bang.
Thank you.