i'm tired of learning on my own
From mid 8th grade through 12th grade, I was homeschooled... or more accurately, I homeschooled myself. My parents didn't have the skills to teach me, and I didn't have access to qualified tutors, so what choice did I have?
Adults, especially college advisors, were very impressed by this— such a smart, motivated student. And I was proud of myself... but these days I look back and see the not-so-great side of leaving an anxious, perfectionistic teenager totally in charge of their own studies. Because I had nothing but an answer book to tell me if I was doing well, I was needlessly hard on myself. I even hit myself because I got a B on a math test! The fundamentalist curriculum I'd been given didn't exactly help me to be kinder to myself, either— its worldview was very pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps. (Fellow A Beka survivors, I offer you a manatee snoot boop of solidarity. That curriculum was messed up in so many ways.)
Why am I talking about this 15 years later? Because as I try to learn a bit of game development, I keep hitting walls... and I think those walls were built when I had to teach myself everything as a teenager.
First, there's the perfectionism I mentioned earlier. A Beka drummed into me the notion that everything in the world has One True Answer, and that there's One Correct Way to think and do things. It took me many years to unlearn that way of thinking and let myself experiment and question again... and I'm still unlearning. Taking up new skills is scary because what if I do it wrong?
Second, relying mostly on online tutorials (helpful though they are) sometimes feels like grading my own high school work, unable to ask questions in real time. ("Why am I getting syntax errors when my code looks just like the example?" "Is this part hard for everyone, or am I just not cut out to make games?" "Can you clarify this ambiguously-worded instruction for me?") So my brain goes nope, not this again and freezes up. It's like I had a finite amount of motivation and spent up most of it in my teens and early 20s.
The 32-bit café is a wonderful place to talk to real people about computer stuff, but I'd give anything for someone to sit beside me IRL, not separated by a screen, walk me though each little step, point out the nuances, and give me some encouragement when my brain says nope. It's been so long since I had that.