I joined as an intern in 2022. I almost didn’t make it past the first year.

Not because I was pushed out. Because I nearly walked out myself.

Training was hard. Not “challenging in a fun way” hard — genuinely demoralizing. I’d sit through a session, watch others nod like it all made sense, and feel my stomach drop because I wasn’t getting it. I was sure everyone could see it too. That I’d slipped in by mistake and any day now someone would notice. More than once, I quietly decided I’d quit. This clearly wasn’t for me.

Here’s the thing I wish someone had told me back then: it wasn’t that I couldn’t learn it. It’s that I was trying to learn it their way.

People absorb things differently. Some get it from a single explanation. Some need to break it and rebuild it with their own hands. Some need to write it down, or teach it to someone else, or sit with it overnight before it clicks. I’d been measuring myself against how fast the room seemed to move, when the real question was never how fast — it was how, for me.

Once I stopped trying to keep pace and started figuring out my own path, things changed. I worked out what actually made concepts stick for me. I leaned into that, hard. And where I was still behind, I did the unglamorous thing: I put in more effort. Extra hours. Extra questions. The repetitions nobody saw. There was no shortcut hiding somewhere — just the willingness to do more of the work in the way that worked for me.

It was slow. But slow and steady still gets there.

Four years on, I’m a mid-level engineer. And the biggest change isn’t the title — it’s what happens inside me when something breaks. The anxiety is gone. The urge to hide, to stay small and hope no one asks me a hard question — gone. Because somewhere in those four years I learned the one thing that actually matters: I can figure it out. Maybe not instantly. Maybe not the way the next person would. But eventually, I will resolve it. I’ve proven that to myself too many times now to doubt it.

That confidence wasn’t a gift. I built it, one stubborn problem at a time.

So if you’re early, and it feels like everyone else got a manual you didn’t — you didn’t miss anything. You just haven’t found your way yet. Look for it. Make the work easier on yourself where you can, and put in the extra effort where you can’t.

And whatever you do, don’t quit right before it starts to make sense.