I think I had another epiphany just now and I love those moments!

I had an interview with a recruiter that reached out to me, which is great timing given that I’ve been laid off last week. The interview went great and I think I’m perfect for the job, but the next step is the coding interview, which is my least favorite part and the one that I struggle with the most. But I left the interview feeling really good about myself, having realized in talking about all of my experience that I actually do know a thing or two about software development.

For a long time I thought I was unhappy in my career as a software engineer because programming didn’t come “naturally” to me. Technically heavy subjects were difficult for me in a way that studying languages or history or art never were. I struggled a lot and I thought that was why I was unhappy and felt like I needed to escape. The escape of my dreams was always becoming an artist as my paid profession.

The last several months where my coworkers and I pretty much knew that we would be laid off have resulted in a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do with my working life. I made plans and researched options on how to get paid to do art. But none of those pathways really congealed into anything for me. Then it occurred to me that I could do scientific illustration, especially paleobotanical illustration and I researched that. I bought over $200 in undergraduate level textbooks to learn about botany and paleobotany and then while waiting for those books to arrive, my interest started to wane and I started to worry that I had wasted a lot of money and had once again chased something shiny only to abandon it without really trying.

But having realized something about myself, I think I can find the spark for paleobotanical illustration again. I don’t know if it’s something I am going to pursue as my sole career, but it’s definitely not something I just want to drop.

The thing I realized about myself is that I like to do hard things.

The challenge inherent in throwing myself against the wall of my own limitations and then finally conquering it is immensely satisfying to me. It’s literally the reason I always tell people why I switched my major to computer science in college – it seemed like the most difficult thing I could find!

Thinking even further back, it’s why when I started running I joined the track team in high school and joined the distance running group instead of the sprint group – it seemed like the harder option.

It’s why I always feel good about myself when I am super patient with the kids (because it means our relationship is good but also because it’s pretty much the hardest thing I have ever had to do). It’s why when I have a good work day it’s always when I’ve been coding. It’s why I gravitated to paleobotany and ecology. These things are really difficult. And in facing the things that are difficult for me to do, I find satisfaction.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy art or think that becoming a world famous artist or whatever is easy. It’s that it involves skills that I have always considered to come more easily to me. But coding? Math? Natural sciences? Those things have not come as easily to me and it’s why I’ve been persisting as a software engineer despite how bleak the whole thing has been for the past decade.

I love art. I will always make art. It gets me into flow like nothing else can. And that’s not to say that there aren’t difficult aspects of art. Achieving realism is very difficult. It requires a level of mastery that I admire and that’s why that’s the style of art I gravitate towards. It’s why I need to start drawing more even though painting in color is the thing I want to do. I need to challenge myself, to push myself to do the thing I don’t necessarily want to do and come out the other side.

I think this is why the paleobotanical illustration is still a good fit. In order to be good at it I need to learn a lot about ecology and botany, which are surprisingly math heavy and thus very intimidating for me. But it’s not enough just to like plants of the environment as some idea. I have to study these things. I have to draw with as much accuracy as possible because the point isn’t really self expression, it’s recreating what these plants might have looked like with the best possible information I can glean. And that’s a hard thing to do!

It’s why I need to code (or at least do coding projects with AI, though that’s a whole other can of worms I’m not opening right now). It’s why I need to draw in order to render as realistically as possible. It’s why I need to exercise. The harder, more difficult, more challenging, more “against my nature” the better.

I’ve been telling myself all this time that I was unhappy because these things didn’t come naturally to me. But in accepting that the thing that gives it meaning is the difficulty will help me. This realization is giving me a whole new understanding of myself. I will seize it.