Today we were reviewing a statistics question. The content of the question doesn’t matter, but the answer does. We were talking about solutions to problems, my favorite subject. I figured out that there had to be a solution to this problem, and my professor said: “That’s math over your head. It’s over my head.” The lady has a PhD in evolutionary psychology, and probably knows more about social psychology than I’ll figure out for another decade. Yet it’s this arrogance, over my head. You joking? I’m always at the same time in over my head and underwhelmed by the challenges presented to me. That’s fricken the life of a broke student.
It’s the life of a mentally ill person with intellectual ability to push through anyway. I’m in over my head, but I’m used to it. Right now I’m working on applying to grad school and others are saying “that graduate school might be too hard to get into.” I know it though, but why not try? Why does everyone around me avoid the difficult by pretending it is impossible. Very little is impossible. Impractical is usually the reason, but frankly the people making those judgement calls don’t have all the data.
Right now I’m standing when I feel like everyone thought I would fall. I kept working when it seemed like I should throw in the towel. In my head the big battle, the worst impossibility was already defeated. Everything else? Smaller problems than the ones I’ve already lived through. The terrors of my present are nothing compared to the nightmare of my past.
3 comments
I think you need to think through this a bit more. As a depressed university student, I can empathise but not entirely relate. Your teacher suggesting that what she cannot do might also be difficult is setting realistic goals to achieve so you are not disappointed. No offence, truly, but your ego is coming across as arrogant.
yeah, it’s kind of the struggle I’m in right now. I lean so heavily on it that I get dependent. My ego needs to be kept in check, and I know that I have limitations. It’s just frustrating hearing limitations, doubts that I’ve had myself. Of course it’s a hard thing I want to do, and of course I very well may fail. Screw ups are part of being human. It is my intention to hold on though, and try to do what I must to get where I want to be. It’s what keeps me holding on, that hope that someday I might be a person I’m proud of, more so than I am now.
It’s also tough to not let it go to my head when my teachers do pat me on the head, or select me for special attention. It’s the kind of attention I crave most, the earned type. It doesn’t make me the best, but it does make me better than worthless. I think that word sums up the struggle; the problem of being worthy, of life, of love and of success.
I agree there is nothing worse than the nightmares of my past. But believe me those still have left me in the gutter, I don’t know if I can come back from that.