Well, it finally happened. The moment I have been dreading. The point of crisis. Trial by fire.

Tonight, in Linguistics, my brain just plain shut down.

It crashed. We were learning to diagram a sentence the linguistics way, and it was all coming too fast for me, and the stack of things I didn’t get got higher and higher, and eventually, it all came crashing down.

And I still haven’t recovered. A lot of my mind is still seized up like a high performance engine with way too little lubrication. It’s a combination of emotional trauma and mental overload that is going to take some time to thaw out and give me by brain back.

At least I can type.

And the thing is, I am absolutely sure I am capable of understanding the subject given time and the ability to work at my own pace. But tonight, it was like a cold bomb went off in my head and froze everything.

I know I am using a lot of metaphors that don’t make sense together. Sorry.

And both the teacher and a very nice East Indian girl tried to explain it to me, and I wish I could say that it worked, but it didn’t. The girl went away thinking she wasn’t explaining it right, which is technically true, but I wouldn’t put it that way.

It’s like saying someone failing to beat the world record for long jump just isn’t jumping right. Well yeah, but what they are trying to do is incredibly hard, so it’s no shame to fail at it.

What I am saying is that my brain was frozen to the point of Olympic level stupidity.

Now there are a lot of bad way I could go from here. Bad ways I have gone before. I could decide that I “suck” at Linguistics and quit the course. I could blame the teacher for making the course too hard. I could even blame Linguistics for being so fucking complicated.

But I am not going to do any of those things. They are unworthy of me. I am going to do my damnedest to wrap my brain around this stuff, and if I fail, I fail. I will fail all the way to the final exam, if that is what it takes.

The one thing I will not do is quit.

No more grabbing the first excuse to GTFO of a situation just because I am not happy with it. No more assuming that if it doesn’t come to me naturally, it’s too hard for me period. No tapping out just because I want to go back to my hidey hole and lapse back into being pointless, unimportant, and devoid of worth.

The world doesn’t give a fuck about your potential, kids. It cares what you can do.

So I am going to attack the problem and keep on slugging. Right now, it all seems to be irresolvable ambiguity and grasping at shadows. But I am coming at it in an already frustrated, freaked out, fucked up, and frozen state.

Maybe when my mind and heart thaw out, it will all become clear. If not, I will enjoy the novel experience of having to learn things the way normal people do.

You know… with hard work. Weird.

The experience I had tonight was not entirely novel. It has happened to me exactly once before : when I was trying to learn computer programming.

I breezed my way through the first semester of programming. I had full expectations of doing the same in the second semester. But that rising escalator the prof had talked about that I had so smugly assumed was for other people caught up to me. Past a certain point, I was not actually absorbing the information at the speed at which I was receiving it. Or rather, I wasn’t integrating it fast enough.

And faithful readers will know that I don’t handle undigested info very well.

Eventually, all the things I don’t understand accumulate to the point where I crash. I don’t understand part C because I barely understood part A and part B is a total mystery to me.

And the problem is that my mind shuts down at that point, which means parts D, E, F, and G are entirely lost on me. I can’t just absorb the later parts and then fill in the blanks later. Nor can I deduce the missing part from the parts I have, which is something you would think I would excel at.

Nope. One indigestible blog of information, and the whole system shuts down. Which is fine in places where you are learning information at a steady rate in a logical sequence, like a history class.

But if it’s something which builds in complexity, each new level contingent on the previous ones, then I get the feeling the crash is inevitable.

Unless the process is really, really slow and I am free to stop the lesson at any point and persist in questioning until I understand it.

That’s not going to happen in a university class.

I gave up on programming. Quit the course, decided it wasn’t for me. Maybe if I had stuck it out, I would be a millionaire app developer now. Maybe not.

But there is no way I am giving up this time. This is it. This is The Battle. This is the fight for who I am and who I want to be. Am I the kind of person who quits when things aren’t super easy for him?

Or am I the sort of person who keeps on fighting no matter what, and refuses to quit no matter how bloodied and battered he is from the fight?

The universe can throw a lot at a person. Life is hard, even for the naturally gifted. And there will be many times when you will be tempted to give up on yourself and let the universe win.

But the path to glory is to refuse to do the universe’s work for it, and make it either literally force you to stop…. or let you get what you want.

And I am tired of giving up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.