Misdirection might lead you back to what you love to do!
Tags: devjournal
Published: 2021-05-29 18:38:21

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 on 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.  

I want to share an image here to show my love for Javascript.
![image of javascript code: const ILY = "I love you in ASL hand" // I love you](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/3aha4fipcnqy692tj519.png)

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