What to do When You Hit a Wall
A critical error has occurred.
I found myself staring at the white screen of death on my laptop. After weeks of designing this website, it decided to crash three days before my deadline. I spent the day scouring articles and listening to the same 30-second loop while on hold with customer support. And after hours of troubleshooting, all I managed to accomplish was turning my white screen of death into a half-page long list of errors.
Reasons for this may include:
System overload
Allowed limit exhausted
Server unavailable to handle request due to overload or required maintenance
Wouldn’t it be nice if the universe would only throw you one problem at a time? That way, you could properly manage each one before the next hits. Sighhh, If only… but that’s never the case, is it? If I’ve learned anything this summer, it’s that life hits you hard and fast, and sometimes you’ve barely had a chance to get to your feet before it takes another swing. Life has been piling it on recently, and I have a page full of errors and absolutely no idea where to begin.
It seems it’s not just art that life mirrors but coding as well. The reason I love/loath web development is because it’s so dependent on problem-solving. Troubleshooting is the unfortunate name of the game, but because of that, I’m constantly learning something new. Website building is like a maze; you hit dead end after dead end until you somehow manage to stumble out on the other side.
I have been troubleshooting this website all day, and if the maze represents the overall problem, I have only just found the door. And lately, the same seems to go for all of the issues existing outside of the computer as well. I feel like I have all of these decisions suspended over my head and no time to think them through.
You go to school for all this time, and then it spits you out into the world with a degree and a six-month grace period to find a job and a place to live before your loans kick in. I had six months to figure things out, and now I’m down to one. And in that time, the only thing I’ve discovered is what I don’t want to do. Sales, I don’t want to do sales. There is also this sense that because I am young and inexperienced, I can’t be picky. I should take what I can get and work from there, but that doesn’t appeal to me either. I have this inexplicable feeling that there’s something I’m supposed to be doing; I just don’t know what that is yet.
A critical error has occurred, and I have no idea how to proceed other than forward in whatever way that means for today. Whether I turn left, right, or backward, at least I’ve figured out one more way that isn’t working, and sometimes that’s just as important as knowing what is.