the solution is the problem
Six months of research, and the thing I was doing to escape it was the thing making it long.
I hated research for the first three months.
Every day I woke up wanting to be done with it. I rushed every objective, took the first plausible answer, and moved on — which meant I did the same work twice, then three times. I was trying to reach the end faster and I kept extending the middle.
I’m impatient by nature. Every moment is a means to some other moment. Research does not negotiate with that.
Somewhere in the second half I stopped fighting. I don’t know the day. I just noticed one afternoon that I’d spent four hours on a question I knew was probably a dead end, and hadn’t once checked the time.
What came back was curiosity — the childlike kind. No shame in asking the foolish question. Willingness to chase the non-obvious idea and then kill it with data. I learned to like not knowing. Elimination stopped feeling like failure and started feeling like progress, because it is.
There was no click. I kept waiting for the moment where everything resolves, and it never came. What I got instead was better: a relentless pursuit of understanding that simply cannot be rushed.
That’s the part I had backwards. I thought the problem was the distance between me and the answer, and the solution was to close it as fast as possible. But the closing is the whole thing. My solution was the problem.
The solution is the problem.