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After a long time!!

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash


A year ago, I would have jumped with joy if I had known that someone read my blog and deemed me suitable for a writing job.

I would have spent hours and hours writing and re-writing the draft for that job, going through every sentence and every word painstakingly, and meticulously arranging the order of paragraphs until I got the story I wanted to convey. I would have given up on food and sleep, forgotten about the entire world, and just drowned in the imaginary world I would have built in my draft.

I would have done many things back then, but sadly when the time arrived for me to do it all, words became hard to find. I floundered with my thoughts as the anxiety of meeting deadlines and providing updates relentlessly escalated. I felt less like a writer and more like an imposter back then. I choked big time.

I ended up failing to do that job and placed the blame for my failure on the turmoil in my life caused by my decision to move to the United States for my higher education in August 2022.

I had a difficult and tiring transition period that required me to socialize and network in a foreign country to have any shot at surviving in the challenging job market. This came after living like a recluse for almost 2 years due to the pandemic.

And it was no surprise that I didn't excel in networking either. I labeled myself an introvert, which I rightly am, but I had never explicitly used it as an excuse for avoiding conversations until this point in my life. I built an extensive professional network on LinkedIn before arriving in the United States, but I threw it all away by stopping to post and engage with my network on this platform.

On top of all this, I feel like a part of me died when I failed to complete that writing job, a rare opportunity that fell into my lap solely because of my move to the United States. Writing has always been my escape from the troubles of the real world. It has been more than just a pastime; it has been a passion for me.

While I somehow managed to adapt to life in the US by overcoming all the difficulties, my extended writer's block acted as the last straw that broke the camel's back. It had a rippling effect, as I slowly lost confidence in other areas, such as talking to people, learning new concepts, and more. This meant I had a chaotic internship search that lasted for an embarrassing period of eight months. I accumulated rejection emails from thousands of internship applications and experienced failed outcomes from three interviews.

I could continue to blame the difficult transition to life in the United States, but it won't change the fact that I wasted my time searching for reasons to blame when I could have focused on finding valuable lessons to learn and grow.

In retrospect, it was like a row of dominos arranged in sequence. As the first domino fell, it triggered an extended chain reaction, causing all the subsequent dominoes to fall to the ground. I recently realized that it is now the time for me to break this chain reaction, go back to the initial domino, and start rebuilding whatever it was when I began my journey in writing and data science simultaneously in December 2021.
Dominoes Falling One By One GIFfrom Dominoes Falling One By One GIFs

My blog was one of the unintended casualties of all this mess, but I have decided to resume writing about my thoughts and new concepts I learn in the expansive fields of data science and AI on a platform that has always allowed me to stay true to my nature.

The world of writing has changed a lot from the last time I wrote a lengthy blog post, for most of which ChatGPT is responsible. I used to feel worthless as a writer after the initial bloom of ChatGPT - how can I compete with a language model of roughly 175 billion parameters? However, I now realize I can still provide unique value to the world through my original thinking. I don't mind being a human writer in a world dominated by AI-powered writers.


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