My Semi-Colossal Changes Over the Last 3 Months

My debts were still enormous compared to the salary I was earning — less than 80,000 rubles a month. I couldn't force myself to work even harder at a physical job, because doing so only led to even more expenses. I barely had any freelance orders, and my brain simply wasn't working. In short, fear was getting the better of me. Money and I have never really been friends.

Damn me, I ended up going to work at a Magnit warehouse as an order picker. More precisely, a female recruiter had called me four or five times with what sounded like an attractive job offer at their warehouse. Since I still didn't have enough commercial experience for more serious IT positions, I agreed — but only temporarily.

After joining Magnit, I decided that I needed to study several foreign languages in case I eventually relocated somewhere: keep improving my English — which was around B1 in May — while also adding Serbian and Spanish.

Unfortunately, I overestimated myself. There simply wasn't enough time, and after two warehouse shifts in a row my brain barely worked. So I decided to temporarily remove Serbian and Spanish from my daily routine and focus on English.

Throughout all of this, I have kept studying English without dropping it, because I believe it can open most of the world to me — except, perhaps, the places where AI will have already made it impossible for me to find a job.

I am still learning English, but after three months I haven't reached B2 yet. I still make grammatical mistakes, lack enough phrasal verbs, and my speaking output in general is still weak. Despite that, I can comfortably listen to, read, and watch B2–C1-level content with almost no translation.

I paused my studies of JavaScript, Laravel, and several other technologies because I decided to return to Python, which I had started learning last year. Still, I will occasionally return to my previous stack because my website and several projects on my server use those technologies.

Over time, however, I became increasingly exhausted because of my work at Magnit. In May and early June, I could still exercise on my days off. Later, even that became difficult, and I started needing much more time to recover.

Nevertheless, I kept working while continuing to storm my way through programming and English.

At the same time, I was doing freelance work whenever I could, but there were not enough orders to deal with my financial burden. My main source of income was still Magnit.

Gradually, recovery started taking an entire day. It wasn't just my wrists and grip that hurt anymore — my sides started hurting as well, and eventually I became too tired even to study. On the first day off, I often didn't want to do anything at all.

I started thinking that I needed to find something else, because I couldn't simply sit around waiting for another good job to appear.

I think I'm no longer at the age where I can keep doing this much heavy physical work. On top of that, I seem to have a hereditary predisposition on my mother's side related to bone and musculoskeletal problems.

Three weeks ago, I finally ended up twisting in severe pain after developing intercostal neuralgia. It wasn't the first time heavy physical loads had caused me neuralgia.

The pain felt as if an electric current was running through me every time I lifted boxes of vegetables. The doctor recommended that I quit because this was not the first episode caused by intense physical strain.

Naturally, I panicked. I still had loans to pay, my freelance income wasn't enough, and my credit cards were eating up most of my money.

After about five minutes of panic, I pulled myself together and decided that I needed to return to technical support — but not first-line support. I wanted to get into second-line support.

I sent out 214 applications without using a bot, because I researched every company before sending a cover letter.

Eventually, one company made me an offer.

I suppose I can call that a miracle, although I'm not exactly overwhelmed with joy yet because the salary itself isn't particularly high. On top of that, I was hired for a project that is expected to last only four months.

I still accepted the offer because it gives me commercial experience. During these months, I plan to improve my English further and learn some additional technologies.

Then, around November or December, I'll start trying to find something better.