Fear Loop

As an observer, I'm always interested in noting the patterns and cycles that occur in the apparent chaos of life. Learning a programming language and studying the paradigms of  coding has offered me a new and interesting lens with which to view this circuity. One of the concepts that has been prevalent in my thoughts lately is the loop. In programming, a loop is a series of code that continually repeats until a specified value is reached, until a specified iteration of loops is complete, until the loop is ended with a stop statement, or never--in the case that the loop is intended to be infinite or lacks the necessary programming to interrupt the circuit.

Starting out on such lofty plan as becoming a developer is frightening. My family is not college educated. I'm 29, which feels like a late age to begin to code. I'm a female in a field that is almost completely dominated by males. I live in a small city that doesn't seem to have much industry for programming. I didn't pursue advanced mathematics in high school. I didn't have exposure to the concept of programming as a career choice at an early age. I might not be very good. Perhaps I'm not intelligent enough, or capable of understanding the levels of abstraction. I'm not sure I can keep up with the ever-increasing amount of knowledge required to keep an edge in the field. I don't know any local developers personally.

Now read the prior paragraph over and over. This is my fear loop.

We all have repeating thought loops, whether we are consciously aware of them or not. We internalize ideas from things that we have heard people say, things we have felt, experiences we have had, and we form them into a series of code that we bury deep in our internal programming. One day, for one reason or another, that portion of the program runs, and the loop begins. My supposition is that this is a form of protection that has evolved, and that at one point or another has served to keep us safe and to prolong our lives. In this case, though, I don't feel that I'm benefiting from this loop, and now I'm writing new code to interrupt the circuit. I'm not out in the wild grabbing tigers by the tails, or anything. I just want to do what I enjoy without fear and without feeling like it's something that I cannot or should not do... when that's just not true.