Coming Back to What I Always Wanted

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a hacker.

Nothing technical behind it, nothing I could actually back up. I'd stumbled across videos about Anonymous at around 12 — the masks, the manifestos, the whole aesthetic of an invisible collective taking down systems from the inside, and I was hooked.

I went and did my own research, the kind of research a kid does, which is to say shallow and mostly just click-bait videos. I didn't know what a port was. I definitely couldn't have told you what SQL injection meant. I just knew computers were cool, and that there was apparently a version of "cool" that involved breaking into things. That was enough to plant something.

Then high school happened, then a chunk of university happened, and somewhere in there, that interest didn't fade so much as flatline. It wasn't a slow drift — my interest in tech as a whole just vanished, abruptly enough that even I couldn't explain it at the time.

And the strange part is I didn't just let it go quietly. I kept trying to get it back.

I'd pick up a new programming language for a week and lose the thread. I'd queue up Darknet Diaries episodes hoping the stories would do what they used to do, and they'd just play in the background while my attention sat somewhere else entirely. None of it was a lack of effort. The spark just wasn't catching, no matter how many times I tried to strike it.

What actually brought it back wasn't a video or a course or a deliberate decision to "get into tech again." It was accepting the internship at Web3 Clubs.

I didn't go in chasing some rekindled childhood interest — I went in as a university student conflicted with a path to follow with zero blockchain experience, majorly because I found it to be more interesting than another organization I had also managed to get a position in. But something about being inside a room of people actually building things, with real stakes and real structure around it, did what a stack of half-finished tutorials and unfinished podcast episodes never managed to do on their own. It put me back in motion.

I'm genuinely thankful for that, in a way that's bigger than the internship itself. It didn't just teach me Web3. It switched the drive back on.

The path I handed myself once I was in was Solidity smart contract auditing, and it made sense on paper — though it's a little ironic, looking back, that even without the drive fully restored yet, I still found myself gravitating toward something security-related once again. There's a real shortage of good auditors. The few hundred people doing it well globally are in serious demand, and I had structured support to actually learn it properly.

So I started the way everyone tells you to start: learn the language first, get comfortable with Foundry, work up to the security course after that.

And then I stalled.

Got to Foundry fundamentals and just stopped. Not loudly, not as a decision — I just stopped opening the course. A few days became two weeks before I even admitted to myself it had been two weeks.

For a while I told myself it was the material. Foundry was confusing, the syntax wasn't clicking, maybe I needed a different tutorial. But underneath that, I already knew it wasn't really the material.

What was actually happening was that every time I sat down to look at Solidity, some other part of my brain was somewhere else entirely — reading about CTFs, OpSec, penetration testing. I kept ignoring that pull because it felt like a distraction from the "real" plan I was supposed to be following.

It wasn't a distraction. It was the kid who'd watched those Anonymous videos — the same one I'd tried and failed to wake back up through a dozen abandoned tutorials and half-listened podcast episodes — finally getting loud enough that I couldn't talk over him anymore.

The irony isn't lost on me. I spent months trying to deliberately resurrect that interest and nothing worked. Then it came back sideways, through an internship that wasn't even aimed at it.

The moment that actually clarified things was embarrassingly simple.

I asked myself what auditing actually involves day to day, stripped of the appeal of the title. The honest answer is: it's reading other people's code, slowly and suspiciously, looking for the one place where what it's supposed to do and what it actually does come apart.

That's a real skill, and the people who are great at it are doing something genuinely valuable. But when I pictured myself doing that as the core of my days, nothing in me leaned forward.

I don't want to fact-check code for a living. I want to find a way in.

That sentence cracked something open. Because "I want to find a way in" wasn't a new ambition I was inventing to justify giving up on Web3 — it was the exact same thing I wanted as a kid watching grainy videos about a hacker collective I barely understood, just dressed in adult language and an actual career path instead of a vague fascination with masks and manifestos.

I hadn't discovered a new interest. I'd finally finished reviving an old one — the one that had gone flat for years, that I'd tried to jump-start with new languages and Darknet Diaries marathons and gotten nowhere with, until an internship I took for completely different reasons did it almost as a side effect.

None of the Web3 time was wasted, for what it's worth.

Foundry taught me to read code like it's lying to me until proven otherwise — to look for the gap between stated intent and actual behavior. That instinct doesn't evaporate just because I changed direction. Reentrancy bugs, broken access control, oracle manipulation — these all make immediate sense to me now, even outside an audit context, because they're really just memory safety issues and broken authentication wearing different clothes.

What actually got me moving again, once the decision was made, wasn't more research or more deliberating. It was changing how I was learning.

Videos were quietly killing my momentum — same problem as the Darknet Diaries episodes that used to play without landing. I'd watch, nod, feel like I understood, then retain almost nothing once the laptop closed.

What worked instead was getting handed something broken and being forced to wrestle with it before I was allowed to look anything up. That's basically the whole format of TryHackMe, and it's probably why Pre-Security clicked in days where Foundry hadn't clicked in weeks, and a dozen tutorials hadn't clicked in years.

I finished Pre-Security this past week.

On its own that's a small thing — early-stage content, nothing flashy. But it mattered more than its difficulty suggests, because exactly two weeks earlier I hadn't opened a single course in fourteen days, and was quietly stressed about falling behind on a path I wasn't even sure I wanted to be on.

Finishing it wasn't really about the content. It was proof that the stall had never been a discipline problem. It was a fit problem, sitting on top of a much older, much more stubborn problem — an interest that had gone quiet and refused to come back on command, until it finally did, on its own terms, somewhere I wasn't expecting it to.

I'm not writing off Web3 security.

The overlap between the two fields is bigger than it looks from outside; thinking adversarially, hunting for broken trust assumptions, refusing to take a system's word for what it claims to do. That's the same muscle whether the target is a smart contract or a live network. If pentesting eventually loops back toward auditing somewhere down the line, that's not a contradiction. That's just the field being smaller than people think.

For now though, the direction is traditional security, properly, the way I wanted it before I even knew what to call it or had any idea what a port was.

TryHackMe's Jr Penetration Tester path next. eJPT after that. And a notes file that's already filling up faster than my old Foundry notes ever did.

Funny how that works.

I spent a long time trying to force my way back to this and couldn't. Then I said yes to something unrelated, and it just showed up, like it had been waiting for the right door to walk back through, not the one I kept trying to kick open myself.