Two years of calling myself "backend" was mostly me avoiding CSS, and it finally cost me

I wrote APIs, queries, tests. Any ticket that touched the UI, I traded away with a teammate inside about ten minutes. I told myself this was specialisation. It wasn't. Flexbox made me feel stupid, so I built an identity around not needing it.

Then the frontend person on our team went on leave for two months, there was a small internal dashboard that had to ship, and nobody else was free. The exact thing I'd been dodging turned out to be the entire job that quarter.

What got me unstuck, in case anyone's in the same hole:

• I stopped reading about CSS and rebuilt one page of our own app from an empty file. No library, deliberately ugly, purely to find out what broke.
• I learned exactly two things properly, the box model and flexbox, and refused to touch anything else until neither one surprised me anymore.
• Every time something moved for a reason I couldn't explain out loud, I wrote the reason down. That list got short much faster than I expected.

Three weekends to go from panic to competent enough to ship it. Two years of avoidance, three weekends of actually trying. That ratio still bothers me.