learning disability

I'm doing ok in chemistry, but mostly just because I've been diligent about turning in assignments.  Putting in enough work to get good grades, while I still bomb on the quizzes.  I'm not actually learning the material all that quickly.

I try not to look too lost in class, because the teacher watches, often asking where she's losing us.  If she asks me, I don't know what to say.  I don't know where to start.  She repeats an explanation, but I can't seem to parse the words quickly enough to remember any of it.  I'm still just as lost, and I honestly don't know why.

I hear the words, I understand most of the individual parts.  It's when she's putting it all together, in some step by step process that I don't organize the incoming information well, focusing on some pieces, missing others, keeping no track of the order any of it's in.  "Jab, cross, hook, kick" still loses me half the time.

I don't follow directions well.  I've always hated instruction manuals.  Now I'm trying to remember all the different rules of redox reactions and how to calculate the stoichiometry, balancing equations, and molar conversions, to milliliters, to grams.

Unlike physics, bombing in chemistry just means getting about a third of the answers wrong.  Should still average out to another C+ maybe even a B.  Not great, but what really gets me is that I still don't even know how to play a guitar.

The problem seems bigger than chemistry and physics.  In theory, I can learn how to do things.  Of course, but, have I ever learned how to do anything?

I'm actually drawing a blank here.  The only things I'm good at were largely a matter of winging it.  Some things can be achieved with enough practice, maybe learning a few basics.  Other things though, seem to require being taught some pretty complicated stuff.  I'm making progress I think, but I'm not actually sure.  I'm figuring out how to get through it.  I'm learning odd and ends, I'm getting a good amount of mental exercise, but what am I doing again?

Human beings are extremely adaptive.  We make do, we get by, we look normal.  My life has certainly been atypical though.  Trying to understand my teacher is a bit like trying to understand what the fuck I'm supposed to be doing in this world.  In this society.  It's all such a jumble of fucking nonsense to me.