The Hidden Struggle of Learning Without Guidance.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have guidance, and those who have to figure out everything on their own.
Some people have someone standing right behind them, encouraging them, saying: "Yes, you can do this! Go ahead, I’m here. I’ll explain it to you, I’ll tell you how to do it. You just start, I’ve got your back." They get a complete roadmap. If they get stuck or make a mistake, their mentor says, "I did it this way, try it like this. If you need help, I'm right here."
They don't have to spend hours searching. They don't have to keep guessing. They don't have to suffer through endless trial and error.
The Reality of Having No One to Guide You
Then there are people who don't have anyone.
No one tells us where to look, what to search, or where to find the right path. So what do we do? We continuously search on YouTube, on different internet browsers, on site after site.
And you know what happens? We end up facing a massive amount of data.
Get Nishu’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
We get overwhelmed. You look at a list of links, try one thing, and it leads to ten more things. You think, "Oh God, there are so many! Where do I even start?" You have no idea which source to trust, so you try one method. It fails. You try another method. It fails again.
That is the actual struggle of someone learning without guidance.
Why People Don't Understand Our Struggle
The hardest part isn't just the searching—it's how people look at us while we are doing it.
People around us don't see the effort. They look at us sitting at our screen, trying to figure things out, and they think:
"You're just wasting your time."
"You're doing unwanted things."
"You've been working so long, where is the result?"
They don't understand that we don't have a shortcut. We don't have someone giving us the answer on a silver platter. Searching for the answer, failing, getting confused, and trying again is our work. We aren't wasting time; we are building our path from scratch.
People Need to Understand and Respect This Journey
If you see someone struggling to figure things out on their own, please try to understand. They aren't slow, and they aren't wasting time. They are doing ten times more work just to find the starting line that others were handed for free.
To everyone who is fighting through the confusion, searching through endless tabs, and learning everything on their own without any guidance: keep going.
It takes a lot of strength to stand on your own feet when no one is standing behind you. Respect your own struggle, even if others don't understand it yet.
