How do you get out of a Drupal rut?

I’ve been a member of drupal.org and a Drupal professional for approximately four years. The Drupal project is a huge part of my life. My professional life is currently largely based on this project. A large part of my social life is tied up with Drupal too… Many of my very best friends are people I met via involvement with Drupal. I love the Drupal project and I love the people of the Drupal project. Being involved with Drupal has brought many positive things to my life.

Professionally, I identify as a Drupal themer. My resume of stuff I’m worked on generally impresses people.

My identity in the project probably falls more along the lines of Drupal socialite. I’m reasonably well known by people, but less for contribution and more for the fact that I’ve knitted a Drupal hat and a Druplicon, and I sported Drupal blue hair for about a year.

I’m in a place right now where I’m not particularly happy with the way my professional life is going.

In terms of everyday working life, I’m feeling a little bit stuck. I’ve been working on essentially the same project for two years. I’m tired of it, I’m not learning, and I want to move on.

I’m not happy with my identity within the community. I’m ashamed of the fact that I hit my four year Drupalversary last month and I’ve never committed a line of code to the project itself.

However, I seem to be stuck.

I’m in a position right now where my everyday work doesn’t require me to do a lot of heavy lifting. The platform I’m working on is already built. It has some irritating idiosyncrasies to work around, but my day in and day out pretty much boils down to views configuration, block placement, CSS and the occasional views tpl override.

It’s been over two years since I had any involvement in site building. Things have changed a lot since then.

Looking for a new job when you feel like your skills have atrophied significantly isn’t easy. I worry a little that the fact that I’m being openly honest about that is going to reflect negatively on me and I won’t be hired anywhere, and the fact that I don’t know this stuff like the back of my hand doesn’t really make me feel very confidant about striking out on my own.

I also have a really difficult time reaching out to ask for help. I’ve been around the Drupal block, there’s an assumption that I know my shit. It’s difficult to swallow my pride and admit that I don’t know what I’m doing, can someone walk me through this so I’m going down the right path? I find myself kneecapping myself a little too… Instead of taking opportunities at Drupalcon and DrupalCamps to be a student, I find myself running around being a social butterfly…. largely because I find myself so frustrated by the fact what I’m learning can’t be immediately incorporated into my day job.

I’ve been trying to figure out ways to get me out of this rut I seem to be in.

My idea today was to maybe give porting a theme that was originally designed for WordPress to Drupal, but I all of the sudden hit the fear wall. What was the “right way” to get started on this? I went digging into Drupal’s getting involved documentation and started feeling flustered instead of empowered. Not because anything that was said there was difficult, it was just that I had a gripping fear of “doing it wrong”.

I start thinking a bit along these lines…

Okay, so before I apply for a CVS account and start a project, I need to make something… Fair enough. But how do I start? What’s the best practice for developing something like this? Should my test bed have some version control? How do I even set that up? Good god, I don’t even know how to check anything out from CVS to install it. Someone’s going to tell me I need Drush, I don’t even know what that is other than it has something to do with the command line. I hate the command line. It scares me. I’m still using FTP for my personal stuff. Everyone says that’s doing it wrong. When I do this professionally I have someone to do this stuff for me. What do I do? What do I do? Oh fuck it, I’m just going to go take a nap instead.

I find myself wondering if I’m doomed to this pattern forever and if I wouldn’t be better off becoming a waitress.

Has anyone else ever been through this? How do you dust off the cobwebs? How do you not get overwhelmed and frustrated with the things that you don’t know and feel yourself fighting against knowing? Thoughts appreciated.