This post represents one in which I talk to myself. Feel free to read or to skip. Comments on these posts are closed.

My struggle with chemistry continues. It’s actually really fucking embarrassing, but I want to be up-front about it, mostly with myself.

Here’s the ironic thing: I actually like chemistry. Because I like learning. I like science. I like philosophy, and I see all the natural sciences as offshoots of philosophy.

I’m intimidated by math, but the part of my brain that does math actually works pretty well, when I’m not feeling intimidated by it. I can do long-division in my head in those few moments of twilight consciousness when I’m falling asleep.

I have a good brain.

But chemistry terrifies me. It seems to be the space where I have concentrated all of my fears and negative associations with school. I was harassed to the point of assault in school when I was younger. I only recently started dealing with those memories explicitly, and it’s stirred up a lot of emotional sediment.

I also have a mental illness that often, for lack of a better way to phrase it, kills people dead. I have learned, for better or worse, to live with it. I am still struggling to learn to live better with it, but I have thus far learned to survive. And that is good.

So here’s the rub — I’m scared to disappoint people. I am scared to not be loved. This fear manages to overshadow and spoil a lot of my natural curiosity and passion for school, because it feels like a manipulation: in order to be loved, you must do X, Y, and Z.

How do I respond to manipulation? Fuck X, Y, and Z.

And I get angry at school. I’m a resentful student, and I blame school. But the problem — as fucked-up as I know the carrot/stick school system is — is actually my own fear of being unloved. Of disappointing and therefore losing the love of people who now love me.

The problem is my belief that love is conditional. And that if I don’t pass chemistry, I will not be loved, and thus not deserve to live.

Inside of me, there is some kind of psychological pillar that stands there like a stone regent. This regent has one, ultimate power: to refuse. To say no. To stop all motion, to freeze time. To stand in place and be utterly unmoved.

I run up against this regent when I have been pushed to the limits of my emotional capacity. The regent, in practice, can ruin my fucking life and all my plans, but it is actually there to protect me. Because I am so terrified, as a human being, of saying no, of respecting my limits and protecting myself, of asking to be loved anyway — because, in short, I am incapable of handling my sovereignty as a human — The Regent takes over for me, as regents do.

The Regent says no for me by pinning me in one place and refusing to move. The Regent says I can’t do this for me by refusing to do anything at all.

Right now, The Regent is saying you must love me and I have reached my fucking limit and I have been battered by the world and need time to recover … by refusing to study chemistry.

In order to reascend my chair, as someone who likes and wants to learn chemistry, I probably need to start saying these things for myself.