rethinking the calculus

Stopped taking sertaline two weeks ago.  Can't help buy notice I'm inclined to write more, again. Mostly focusing on politics for now, but not much going on until Nevada's clusterfuck caucus next week. No doubt it will be a catastrophe, the only question being how bad, and how much rigging they'll try to do amidst the chaos.. but enough about that.

I should be doing calculus. It makes me feel so stupid.  It's incredibly discouraging.  Why am I doing this to myself?  I don't know, but I can't let it beat me.  I can't quit, just accepting that I'm too dumb to figure it out.  It helps to remind myself that I started with College Algebra.  That's where the placement test put me, but I've never taken any math before.  I didn't need a brush up on factoring - I had no idea what factoring was, hoping I'd be able to wing it.

Part of why I've been struggling may simply be that there are all sorts of gaping holes in my knowledge, stuff I'm expected to know from high school.  Maybe it's not chronic dyscalculia after all, but starting at that level does seem to have been a mistake.

Simply put, I had no idea math was going to be this hard.  I'm certainly no genius at it.  I vaguely remember posting before I started, that I didn't even know what algebra was.  Kind of joking, but not really ..and now example problems from my math homework look like [this]

I want to get through this last semester of math, but then reconsider my direction. I wanted to make this extra difficult for myself, in a way.  I wanted to learn new things, but it's been a lot of work struggling to catch up all the time.  More than I've been able to handle.  Maybe my energy would be more efficiently spent studying things that come more naturally to me. Might make more sense to consider what I'd be comfortable with doing all day every day, too.

I've been seeing this academic counselor whose been trying to help me with that. Like, if I'm into writing and politics, why not political science and journalism?  It seems implausible to me that people would be paid for such a thing but who knows.