# Day Zero

July 20, 2025. A MacBook Air (given to me by Master School Institute of Technology) lands on my desk. New machine, new chapter.

I’ve been learning things my whole life. Thirty-odd years in advertising means you adapt or you disappear — new tools, new platforms, new ways people consume things, endlessly. So I’m not new to learning. I’m not even new to technology.

But this felt different.

I logged into the Campus platform for the first time — the learning environment for my cybersecurity program — and sat there for a moment just… looking at it. My study cohort was there. Other people who’d signed up for the same kind of late-pivot, or early-start, or whatever their story was. New names. New faces. A new world that looked familiar from a distance but was alien up close.

Strange feeling for someone who hacked with his Commodore 64 before most of his cohort was born.

The thing is: knowing you’re technically minded doesn’t protect you from feeling like an outsider when the domain is new. I knew what a network was. I knew what malware was. I’d read about zero-days and ransomware groups with mild obsession for years. But structured learning — being a student again, being graded, being measured — that’s its own kind of exposure.

Impostor syndrome arrived on day two. Maybe day one, if I’m honest.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned about impostor syndrome over the decades: my first instinct is never to doubt the situation or the people around me. It’s to doubt myself. Before I question whether something is worth doing, I question whether I’m the right person to do it. Before I call out a gap in someone else’s argument, I look for the gap in my own.

That sounds like weakness. I don’t think it is. I think it’s the only honest place to start.

So I started. I got into TryHackMe — the platform everyone in cybersecurity learning seems to recommend first — and worked through the basics. Simple stuff. What is a network. What does a port do. Entry-level rooms designed for people who’ve genuinely never done this before. I moved through them faster than I expected, which helped. Not because I was smarter than anyone else, but because the C64 kid in me recognized the grammar of this place.

The syntax was new. The logic wasn’t.

By the end of July, I had the rhythm of the thing. Morning: study. Afternoon: labs. Evening: reading. The MacBook Air that felt so new on July 20th was already just a tool by July 31st.

The alien feeling hadn’t gone away. But I’d stopped waiting for it to.