Into the Fire : Linguistics edition

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.

3 thoughts on “Into the Fire : Linguistics edition

  1. I had the exact same experience in high school computer science. CS 11 was easy and everything made sense. It seemed like there was finally hope after struggling for seven years and failing to learn programming. Then CS 12 broke me. It got to a certain point where I just did not have the systematizing intelligence to understand it. Fortunately, it was an AP course, which meant I couldn’t fail it, I could only not do well enough to be allowed to skip the same course in first-year university. That could not be less of a problem, as I never planned to take CS in university.

    I don’t know whether, with expert tutoring, I could have understood it eventually. It might be just too three-dimensional for the hardware I have in my head, and nothing short of cyberpunk neural augmentation would get me any closer. The same goes for the math I failed in first-year university (probability and linear equations). For that matter, I’ve looked at the courses in the continuing education catalog, and it seems like I wouldn’t be able to graduate high school today, since even junior high school math is more complicated than I can understand. I was able to fudge my way through grade nine, ten, and eleven math, making educated guesses at the answers when it came to subjects like matrices, which is surprising, since one of the selling points of math to mathy types is that there’s only one answer and you can’t get it by fudging.

    If I had my life to do over again, I would destroy the idea that I was smart and that therefore I should be smart in every subject, which held me back in childhood because it made me not ask for help or just stop altogether and refuse to go further until I understood, even at the risk of failing. I’d know that I just suck at some things—in fact, most things—and would make the system teach them to me, or declare me a failure so at least I would know where I stood. Then maybe someday I could qualify for some kind of disability. The system would say “We realize that you suffer from a form of retardation where you can’t handle anything requiring systematizing intelligence above a certain level, and we will find a way to academically stream you so that you end up in a good middle-class job that doesn’t require it.”

    When someone’s explaining something to you and they say “Does that make sense?” it’s very hard to say “No,” even more so when you’re a child, and even more so when you’re a gifted child and have self-esteem invested in being above average. Not only that, but when my dad was explaining something and asked if I understood and I said no, he’d ask “What don’t you understand about it?” and I wouldn’t have an answer, since I didn’t understand it enough to understand what about it I didn’t understand. So that made me more likely to push the problem under the rug.

    It took me until I entered the workforce before I figured out how to say “No” when I didn’t understand something. I try to keep that in mind when teaching and a person says they understand but it seems like they don’t.

    I’m potentially at a breaking point with the comedy course. I understand the principles, but I’m not sure I have the mental hardware to use them all at once. I can be witty but that’s not the same thing. I probably just need to write tens of thousands of more jokes. Wax on, wax off.

  2. I guess both of us need to learn how to apply rules one at a time without needing to keep track of the big picture in order to understand things. I think, with the comedy class, you are better off trying to learn things organically instead of academically. Give yourself permission to take what you can use from class and forget the rest.

    The important thing is that you are a very funny person and just need to learn enough to turn that into standup comedy. Write the joke and then make it as funny as you can according to your own tastes. If you get stuck, look up the rules.

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