F’ing School [Rewrite]

[I had to rewrite this due to a kitten that stepped on the keyboard and closed the window – wiping out my entry before I could save. Maybe it’ll turn out better this time. Or maybe I’ll one-up the kitten by clumsily hitting the power switch myself this time. That would be perfect!]

There has to be something seriously wrong with me. I can’t just do easy school work like everyone else can. Listen to me, “everyone else” as if I’m the only one in the world with the problem. As if the world revolves around me. I hate myself sometimes. This past semester has brought out some things that I’ve been denying for a while. Take my self-esteem for example. I have so little left you wouldn’t know it’s even missing unless you believed it actually existed at some point. It’s totally camouflaged by attitude. I’m a big coward. I just thought I had nothing in the world to fear. That’s what I’ve been convincing myself of for the last several years, when really, it’s myself I’ve been fearing all along. I fear what I don’t know – what I might do, what I might not do, what I might be, what I might not be, etc. I don’t trust myself to remember anything, to know anything, to do anything correctly. I think too much in absolutes to be healthy. If something is not an absolute it’s not to be trusted. What kind of sad existence is that? I lead myself to believe that I had more self-confidence than before because I am better at talking to people on my own, better at mustering the courage to start conversations, order my own food at restaurants, trying something on my own before asking for help – just not being quite so shy and dependent on others as I was growing up. I now see that I diagnosed the symptoms incorrectly. I’ve just managed to find a way to tune that part of me out temporarily – ignore the anxiety long enough to jump the hurdle in the same way adrenaline defers the pain. It’s still there, building up until the last hurdle has been conquered. But, of course, I have digressed.

At the moment, I really need to talk about my inability to do easy assignments. There’s a serious road-block [gotta love the corporate bullshit-speak, huh? I’m gonna master it!] in my head when it comes to these assignments. It’s not as easy as just doing it when it comes to class work. I suck it up and just do things I don’t want to do all day at work, but I do those things for other people, not myself. If I’m going to do something for myself like go to school, I want it to really be beneficial. I don’t want to waste my time doing work for the sake of work when I know the instructor knows I know my shit. Why waste another minute doing something that is intended to challenge someone who doesn’t already know it? To prove I have the discipline to get it done? Horseshit. I would have hated me if I had said this seven or more years ago, but high school is for training kids how to work – actually it should probably be learned at a much younger age but that’s another rant. College, even junior/community college should be teaching how to learn. There I go again, about to derail this entry.

My problem is that it’s a battle for me to do every assignment. You can picture a devil on one should and an angel on the other if that’s an image you’re comfortable with, but that’s what’s going on inside my head. The only difference is that there’s no Satan trying to corrupt me for the sake of corrupting me. It’s more of Me vs. Me. Now tell me that doesn’t sound like a match that will end in a draw! In the white corner, Me #1 wants to do the work because it was assigned and it will mean a good grade – he also likes to eat the crust before the sandwich to enjoy the best part last. In the black corner, Me #2 doesn’t want to submit to slave labor – he likes to tear the crust off, throw it to the birds (musn’t be wasteful!) and eat the good stuff first and last. It goes something like this:

Me #1: Okay, this sucks, let’s do this and get it out of the way.

Me #2: No way, dude! Why waste my time on this? This does nothing for me but waste more precious minutes of my life.

Me #1: But I have to.

Me #2: No, you have to wipe your ass. You don’t have to do this work. You know that you know it. He knows that you know. Who else is going to care?

Me #1: But… I have to. I have to get good grades and that means sucking up whatever crap is sent my way not matter how nasty it may be.

Me #2: Wuss!

Me #1: Lazy loser!

[See! It just gets ugly. The first dialog I wrote I thought was funnier than this one, but blame the cute little kitten that destroyed all that work.]

I must sound pathetic. This probably sounds like no big deal, but it seriously is. It’s turning into a losing battle, and Me #2 is winning. Sometimes I want to just sit and rock in a non-rocking chair, clutching my head with both hands like I’m autistic or something. It’s almost painful [probably my imagination] to bring myself to do some of this work. And believe me, 90-95% of the work does this to me. Hardly anything is challenging because my classes are full of morons. Granted, they’re morons who don’t have any problem with motivation like I do, but I’m still going to call them morons. Only one class has been fast enough (the six-week English course) and even that dragged at times during the frequent discussions about things that shouldn’t need to be discussed that much. It’s maddening to me, but it’s always been a problem. All through high school it was a problem. This world is not meant for me. I am just no compatible with the systems that are in place. I always blamed the school system, the grading system… whatever I could other than myself. But it’s something wrong with me. I know it is and it’s going to kill my grades like it did in high school. It’s always just looming around the bend. It’s the monster under my bed, the iceberg ready to sink me, the virus ready to make me sick, the impending doom.

Writing this helped me think of some more things, so it did help to rewrite it in a way, but I’m not going to go back and edit it now to incorporate what I learned. Just know that I learned something. I’m going to bed.