I still do not get it.

I am here in Lunguistics and I am more lost than ever. Everyone else gets it just fine, but I am totally at sea, I feel like I am in Hell.

I don’t feel very safe right now. Hopefully talking to you people will help.

I have so much frustration,  rage, and depression right now. I cannot work my way free of them. The further I go, the deeper I get, and the deeper I get, the wirse I feel. It is raking all my willpower to sit here and type instead of just oacking up and leaving, never to return.

With or without doung something very crazy, like screaming as loud as I can while throwing my desk into the ceilubg as hard as I can.

Nobody here deserves that. Good thing for them I care about that kind of thing. Because I want to do it, just to externalize Howci feel right now. I feel crazy and burning and poisoned and wrong. I feel like I am going crazy. Crazy crazy crazy.

(—)

Home now. Who gives a shit.

In hindsight, I wish I had left class the moment things started going really bad inside me. I was a fool to stay. The longer I sat there, burning with frustration and disappointment, the more depressed I got. Right now I am feeling really fucking dark and ready to tear someone’s fucking head off if it would only take the fire away.

But another part of me likes this. It loves to burn, it wants to burn. It wants to burn as hot and bright as possible, until the whole world burns with it in a glorious blaze of demonic flame.

Traditionally, that would be the part I should be afraid of. But it kind of has a point, in its own mad way. I have a lot of dead wood inside me that needs to burn. Only when the last of it is gone can I be reborn as something pure and healthy and free.

That’s what forest fires are for.

And the thing is, I refuse to take my anger out on anyone else, and I am not supposed to take it out on myself, so what the fuck else am I supposed to do with it? There is no other option. Stupid Pollyanic therapists and pop therapy types will tell me that I shoukld go chop firewood or beat up a pillow or some shit, but that is bullshit through and through. That might work for neurotic housewives and blonde princesses with daddy issues, but here in the real world, the real dark scary fucking world, that shit won’t cut it.

Anger means someone has to pay. It’s me or them. Inanimate objects don’t count. None of them have caused me this kind of pain, and yet I can’t blame anyone else because it’s me who can’t understand something everyone else in the class, including the dumb ones (there’s always a few), seems to understand just fine.

I talked with the prof twice during class. Once during an exercise and once during the break. And it got me nowhere. I can’t keep all these rules and relationships straight in my head, and if I can’t do that, it all dissolves into chaos and quandary at the slightest touch. I understands parts, but without understanding it as a whole, the parts are meaningless to me.

It’s like trying to figure out what a car looks like purely from a pile of parts. Each part could be labeled with exactly what it does and what connects to it, but without a picture of a car, you have no idea what the fuck any of it is all about.

I asked the prof, “Is it possible to condense this into a series of steps?”
She paused, then said “I believe that is what I have been trying to do…. ”
Then I said “I don’t think so. If that is true, you haven’t taught that list yet. ”
She said “I think I have…. ”
And I said “Is that so? Okay, then WRITE THAT LIST. Step one, step two, step three….. write it. ”

And of course, she couldn’t, because the process is not that linear. It’s two-dimensional, and that’s one dimension too many for me. I have never been able to visualize information like that. For a creative person, I have an extremely linear mind, and this syntax tree bullshit is very much nonlinear.

This is the shit I have to put up with.

And I am afraid that if there is not a method to it, I can’t do it. There’s too many rules, too many variables, too much ambiguity. Too many steps skipped by people who don’t know they are skipping them and therefore can’t answer when I ask them how they knew that.

It’s like trying to learn drawing from a book. It doesn’t fucking work.

As I left, I told the prof, “If you see me for the exam on March 1, it means I figured it out. If you don’t, it’s not your fault.”

And it isn’t. She has done her best to explain it to me. But she doesn’t (maybe can’t) grasp why her explanations don’t work. They all involve explaining a tiny piece of the puzzle without shedding any light on the whole. I am expected to be able to fill that in myself, and I just can’t.

I had no idea studying linguistics would be like that. I figured it would be somewhere between an English course and a science course. But it isn’t. It’s more like a computer programming course that is all the more confusing for being based on real English.

I still might drop the course. I don’t want to do it. It’s not like I could replace it. Any course I joined would be six weeks in just like Linguistics is, and I would never catch up. And that assumes there’s any unfilled slots. Seems doubtful.

The teacher told me that the next section, sounds, does not build on syntax. So I might do fine on the rest. But syntax is 25 percent of the grade and I understand only a third of it. So I would be facing a very steep uphill climb to pass, seeing as I haveb’t been doing that great so far either.

Oh, and for the record, I made sure to tell her that while I seemed very hostile, it was just that I was very frustrated. And she said she understood.

I guess that’s it for now. I guess I feel better, but I am far from feeling good.

I honestly don’t know what comes next.

I will talk to you nice and extremely indulgent people later.