Part II-The Berkeley Years

I entered UC-Berkeley in the fall of 1996 and the Internet boom had just started.  As a freshman I started with a sense of optimism that anything was possible and I could accomplish just about anything. I was finally in my element, away from home, free to do whatever I want, and no real authority restricting me. I dabbled a little bit in Internet related things and by the end of my freshman year, I taught myself HTML (this was before WYSWYG editors) and put up a simple web page.  My freshman year was the happiest I ever was during my time at Berkeley. I don’t know what happened.  I can’t explain it, I don’t understand, it and I’ve moved on from it. But, my sophomore year started the beginning of a downward spiral that stayed with me for the rest of my time in college.

Maybe it was the fact that the excitement of freshman year had faded. Maybe it was the fact that I had discovered everybody around me was brilliant and I was getting destroyed in school.  All I know was that sophomore year  I sunk into a fairly deep depression.  It also probably didn’t help that it rained for a month of that year. By the end of that year, I  wasn’t really happy and the idea of returning to Berkeley in the fall didn’t seem appealing at all. I decided to enroll in computer science classes because it seemed like that was the ticket to success. In the 9 weeks of computer science I took, I realized I was horrible at programming.   Not only that, but I hated it.   The spring semester rolled around and I finally started to see a little bit of light. I started to get happy, and I got my first decent internship working ironically at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.  But, again, I was in a job that had nothing to do with my passions or interests. It just looked good on a resume. That summer I was flipping through an issue of maxim and came across some information on NLP and affirmations, and that kicked off my entry into the journey of personal development.  So, I tried them for a month, felt better, and before I knew it I was pretty much back where I started, emotions in control of me, and the victim, once again.  Needless to say this led me through a pattern of self destructive behavior and was the precursor to what I look back on as my personal darkest hour, my early 20’s. Part III