The Year I Was Too Good for HTML

It’s a Tuesday afternoon in Madrid, and I’m sitting in a classroom learning how to center a div.

I already know how to center a div. I’ve known for years. I've built production software and debugged problems at 2 a.m. Now I’m watching a professor explain what a <p> tag does.

Under the desk, I'm scrolling through LinkedIn. A guy from my old school just started at Palantir. Another at Google. How did I end up here? I don’t remember them being so much smarter than me.

The professor asks how to make one word a different color. I look up and start to answer, then shut my mouth, ashamed to answer a question like that.

That evening I went home and cried.

This was not how it was supposed to go.

Since I was a kid, I had pictured myself at a school like Berkeley or UCL, where the coursework pushed you until it hurt a little. I wanted to be challenged. I also wanted proof that all those years of work had put me where I thought I should be.

Leaving Ethiopia to study abroad was not a small thing. I worked for years to earn a scholarship. And I prayed. I prayed to get into a good school, to get out of the country, to finally be where I was meant to be. In my mind, the logic was simple. If you work and pray hard enough, God gives you something good.

So when the scholarship came through, and I moved to Madrid, it felt like the answer to all of those prayers.

The room I actually walked into wasn’t the room I had prayed for. The program wasn’t the deep technical machine-learning degree I had dreamed of. My classmates were smart, but most of them weren’t technical. We had business classes. We had an Introduction to Python. We had HTML and CSS.

My disappointment was real. When you’ve worked and prayed that hard for something, it’s natural to grieve when it doesn’t look the way you pictured it. But I didn't just feel it. I let it run the whole year.

My prayers turned into arguments with God.

If this is from You, how can it be this bad? I couldn't make it fit. I had asked for something good, for years, and this is what I got? Either God had gotten it wrong, or I had. Some days I blamed myself. If my undergrad grades had been a little higher, if I had built a better project, if I had written a better statement of purpose, I would be somewhere else.

Then another voice would answer back. What about the classmate who had lower grades than you and is now at Google? Or the one who went out every weekend and is now at Amazon? I took those comparisons as proof that working hard didn’t matter. So I stopped trying.

Other days I looked for a hidden reason. God didn't bring me all the way here just to learn HTML. There had to be something else. Maybe the person I'm supposed to marry is here. Maybe that's why.

It never crossed my mind that the point might be the place itself, and what I did with it.

Here is the part that still stings.

My lowest grades came in the subjects I knew best. I got a 3.33 out of 4 in Introduction to Python. I've written Python for years. I got a 3.33 in HTML and CSS, a class I could have taught.

It wasn't because I didn't understand the material. It was because I refused to take it seriously. Some part of me believed that trying hard at something this easy would mean accepting that this was where I belonged. A perfect grade in HTML didn't prove anything, so I didn't bother.

The grades were just the visible part. What I did outside the classroom was worse, because I didn't do anything.

I never signed up for a single extracurricular. I never went to an event. I couldn't stand being on campus a minute longer than I had to, so I came for the mandatory classes and went straight home. There was a tech venture program where students built projects and pitched them, entrepreneurship everywhere, and I dismissed all of it.

"That's not what I want to do," I said.

I never looked closely enough to know what I was turning down.

I didn’t really hang out with my classmates outside of class until the last three months. Then one of them told me he tracked his life in thirty-minute blocks. He had an Excel spreadsheet where he logged what he was doing and how focused he had been, even whether he could talk to someone without touching his phone. He wanted to be a founder. As we kept talking, I found out he listened to the same podcasts I did. How had I gone this long without knowing this about him? I could have known him all year.

Instead, I had made myself the outsider. The girl who couldn't care less about anyone or anything, who showed up to morning classes with puffy eyes, and left as soon as she could.

I told myself I didn't belong there.

But I had never actually tried to.

Now it's over. I've graduated, and the transcript says what it says.

The regret isn't really about the numbers. It's about the year. The friendships I started too late. The rooms I never walked into because I'd already decided nothing in them was for me.

I was so busy grieving the school I didn't get into that I barely gave the one I was in a chance.

I still don't have an answer to the question I kept asking God that year. But I've stopped thinking the question was whether the place was good enough. The question was whether I would show up to it.

And I didn't.

Doing the easy thing well was never about the easy thing. It was about who I was going to be while I waited for the hard thing.

So if you're starting something right now that isn't what you pictured, feel the disappointment. It's allowed. Then put it down and look around the room you're actually in. Go to the event. Talk to the person next to you. There's probably more there than you think.

I just didn't look until the year was almost over.