Misdirection might lead you back to what you love to do!
In life, there is always misdirection everywhere. As a child, I dreamed of becoming a pilot because I remember my mom would take me to the pond and there is an airfield nearby. I watched airplanes taking off. At about 11 years old, I was able to pilot an airplane! As I get older, I love playing on the computer and trying new things. I created a website for my high school.
I do want to become a pilot but as I get older, it becomes unrealistic for me because I'm deaf, and $$$ for flight school with the cost of flying hours too. Yes, deaf people can fly but with restrictions.
After high school, I went off to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, one of the colleges of RIT in Rochester, NY. I admit that I have never thought of college until Junior in high school. I think I was not ready for college, I got distracted with social life there and didn't do well in classes there, so they kicked me out. At that moment, I was lost.
That's when a misdirection happened first time in my life, which is dragging me away from things I love to do. I become a person who has no future. That is my perspective of what society thinks of me at that time. I did go back to California, then went on a road trip with my best friend for the entire summer and the duration of the fall season. Then, I ended up back home again.
I got in touch with a college friend who wants to roommate with me in Rochester so I just decided on moving up there to look for work. I have always thought that I would work until I can return to college in a few years which never has happened during that time.
In Rochester, I entered the workforce for the first time in my life at United States Postal Service (USPS), as a temporary contractor. For the 3 years of working there, I tried to move up the ladder at USPS but they never bother to offer me anything. I reached my limit of staying down low. I had to deal with discrimination against my deafness for the first time in my life at USPS.
I packed up and left Rochester. My parents welcomed me back home to their 2 bedroom apartment. My mom helped with my car payments until I secured a social security check from the government. During my time in California, I fall in love with someone and decided to move with her to Alaska, but we didn't work it out there.
During my time in Alaska, I was able to secure a job working as Teacher Assistant at a deaf school there. It was a good experience and after the school year ended, I decided to enroll at Gallaudet University, a well-known Deaf University in Washington DC.
At Gallaudet, I didn't decide on my major until around Junior year. I declared my major in History, then later on I declared a minor in Computer Information systems because I want some easy “A” on my transcripts. Yes, it is because I’m always good with computers. When I started taking computer courses, the students there were like... you? No way! Impossible. I laughed and said yeah I like to keep it low with my computer skills.
After graduating Gallaudet, I fall into debt and I couldn't continue my education beyond my Bachelor's degree which means that I couldn't become a history teacher because most Deaf school out there requires me to hold Masters degree in Deaf Education to secure a teaching job. Now you see... another misdirection.
My college girlfriend saw me going thru the stage of "I don't know what I am doing to do" and I was completely lost again. So, I went back to California again and my parents always welcomed me back home. I have always had that warm feeling of being back with my family again.
My long-distance relationship just shattered because we both have a different love language. She wants me to be present and close by… and I was okay being far away and visit once in a while. We ended it on a good term and still a good friend. After that, I started to wonder what I am going to do with my life… In reality, I don’t know.
I am going into another misdirection in my life that I have never thought of it for a long time. It was when my good friend asked me to help with her web development assignments in her very last year of college. I was like, sure! I do know HTML and CSS, also I have build websites before. So, I helped her mostly with the Javascript part of the course. At the same time, I dived into documentation and coding websites on Javascript. At this point is where I just rediscover my passion for coding!
That’s why I will always love Javascript no matter what! I love the language and the ecosystem. I shifted my focus to programming and decided that I will be an iOS developer because iOS was getting hot during that time. So, I picked up the Objective-C book and it was too hard for me but I went ahead learn another programming language which is Java where I finally understood Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Which made the Objective-C book easier to read because I finally understood OOP.
I went on becoming a software developer on my own and learned so many new things. I will share my developer journey later on and I want to wrap up here with my final thought. Misdirection could be a good thing because it might lead you to some opportunities in life that you never thought of.
If you like my story and interested into more stories later on, follow me on Twitter @vphreak
