Fried brain

I’m writing these few lines from my bed after finishing dinner with my girlfriend at home. We just had simple sandwiches, chips, and nuts because we wanted to eat something light.

Today was difficult, I’m not going to lie. I feel totally defeated. It’s my 15th day since I officially started building this endometriosis app, and while I managed to crawl my way through to finishing the build, I am now totally stuck on the distribution part—getting my app ready for testing using something called TestFlight on the Apple App Store.

It’s been two days that I’ve been trying to get my app to work on my phone, but anytime I open it, it just crashes. I feel totally clueless as to what the root cause of the issue is. I’ve tried isolating the most likely culprits, and still, it feels like I don’t have a good enough grasp or understanding of the underlying technology that I’m using.

I’ll be frank with you: I don’t really understand some of the stuff I’m doing. I Google things as I go and ask the AI for advice. Sometimes it works and I’m able to move on without dwelling too much, and other times it doesn’t.

This time, the issue has been pretty persistent, and I’ve started to lose hope.

It’s not my first product. I’ve had other similar bugs or build issues in the past, and I was able to overcome all of them until now.

So, what should I do?
How is it that I usually handle such tricky things?

The first thing I usually do in those cases is just take a step back. Earlier this morning and later this afternoon, I kept working on trying to fix my bug, but since I couldn’t solve it, around 4 p.m. today I just “gave up” after my girlfriend came home, and decided to call it a day.

I mentally switched off and did something that relaxes me. I wrote a few blog posts, lamented a bit, and talked about my day with my girlfriend. She reassured me, and as we both felt we hadn’t moved much, we went for a walk.

Of course, my brain was still wired to the problem, and I found myself thinking about it, but it quickly cleared out as we started walking, chatting, and sharing about our days—like a huge cloud clearing after it starts raining heavily.

Today was a bit hot, so we didn’t walk that much. Instead, we quickly went to buy our sandwiches. My girlfriend proposed that we go get a head massage, but I just didn’t feel like it and said I wanted to head back quickly.

So, we came back, unpacked our sandwich boxes, put on Netflix, and just called it a day.

Sometimes, I have days like that. But so do many founders around the world, I believe.

How are your days?