Maxwell Escape
2009 was the year I started suspecting that being good at something and understanding it were not the same thing.
Moving from first to second year of engineering, the work piled up and the exams kept finding my limits. The clearest memory is the final electrical practical. I had skipped most of the practical classes and walked in genuinely scared. Then I drew an experiment I happened to be good at, and finished it, and the relief was enormous. It was also luck, and I knew it.
The good parts were real too. Late nights with friends over maths and physics, my first freelancing work, and the competition where, on a whim, I sent in two separate submissions and took both first and second place. I owed a lot of that year to the friends around me.
But I kept running into the same two things. I wanted a mentor and did not have one, and the people around me, however well meaning, could not quite see what I was reaching for. That pushed me to teach myself and go my own way. And in the work itself, my eagerness kept tripping me: I would leap at a solution before I had understood the problem. Patience, it turned out, was as much the skill as anything technical.
By the end of the year the question had changed shape. I did not need more goals. I needed to know where I was actually going.