Sometimes. I feel like I know what I’m talking about. I can wax lyrical about complex topics and reason about them pretty well. Most other times, though, I just dont understand. It’s usually this way with programming. I can pick my way through some code and maybe understand 40% of it, more if there are good comments. Writing code, though, is something that I struggle mightily with.

I’m not a programmer. I know that. I gave up that nascent part of me more than 10 years ago. I wasn’t even a real programmer. I worked on Drupal and PHP with some light HTML/CSS/JS. Most of it wasn’t hard and when I wasn’t doing that, I was being a jockey for InfoPath forms. Again, I had little need to create anything. I could just glue together some stuff and call it a day. The Real Programmers™ did the heavy lifting and I just did make-work to pay the bills.

Now that I’m older, I fancy myself as something more than an IT Professional. I know enough about a couple of programming languages that I get the gist of it, but not really the whole story. I can write half-way decent Bash scripts, Lua and if push-comes-to-shove Python. I also can dust off my old webadmin hat and write some HTML/CSS and JS, but not to any real proficiency. I feel like I’m faking it.

This isn’t the so-called Impostor Syndrome, because I’m not doing this professionally, I’m doing this on my own. I find that despite being able to move the bits around, I can’t seem to make anything creative flow out of me. No impetus to create, even if I feel like that I might be able to, no itch to scratch on my own, even though I see 100 stupid paper-cut issues every day. I don’t know if what I am is just incredibly lazy, tolerant or … defective. I buy and collect all the tooling to make me productive at any number of things. Coding, video editing, photo editing and more. I have no use for these because I’ve got no creative desire. No drive that pushes me past the dicking around part of learning to code and into the “wow this is really useful, what if I could make this thing to fix that thing that I don’t like!”.

Some people might call this “being content.” It bothers me, though. Maybe because I surround myself with people who program, because I like the programs they use, like Emacs. I try to fashion myself into a more complex individual that could be a programmer, but in reality is just some guy who is better than average at a bunch of stuff, but doesn’t really excel in anything individually.

It frustrates me to be this way. I feel like I could do more, but then I hit a wall and nothing I do makes any sense. Like there is an artificial barrier keeping me from moving on. I don’t have any formal training as a programmer, and while I could go back to school, I don’t think it’d be financially worth-while for me and my family. I’m also wondering if that wouldn’t just underscore my defectiveness.

This feeling also seems to dovetail with some of the core concepts that I’ve built up around myself. Linux is harder than using Windows or macOS. Self- hosting is harder than managed hosting. Using hugo is harder than WordPress. Setting up Exchange Online is more work than just getting the Office 365 bundle for families. Emacs is harder to use than Notepad; Every choice I make seems to revolve around doing things harder than they need to be because I want to be that person that is knowledgeable and “in control”. I use plain-text because its “more reliable” when I have no experience with issues in any other format. Nothing I do makes anyone around me happier, or makes them trust me more, or has them rely on my knowledge more. If anything, it drives them away because they don’t understand the issues, or I’m seen as an extreme viewpoint.

I feel like, when it comes to computers, I’m like that stanza from Radiohead’s “Creep”:

… but I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here

Maybe I should stop trying to be something I’m not. If I do that, though, then what am I?