Doing Terrible in School
I’m doing terrible in school, like, not good at all: I’ve been ignoring assignments, handing them in weeks after deadlines, not paying attention to online classes, not doing a lot in team projects, etc. I admit I have done all of these things even before I got into college; but I feel like it’s getting worse: I’m getting worse at everything in general, not just school.
And, what am I doing instead of school? Nothing, really. I wish I was working on cool projects and stuff as I used to; but no, I’m not. No more meaningful projects since mid-2019. My internet browsing sessions are extremely random and highly ADHD-driven, and take up most of my time. I don’t even know what to make anymore, everything seems to require too much effort.
Most of the time I read about things I’m obsessed with, such as free (as in freedom) software, online privacy, digital sovereignty and human rights. I read a lot about random things I suddenly think about, I dive into rabbit holes and forget everything else. I also watch memes occasionally. However, I never do anything to pursue my goals or advance my “life mission”, and that makes me feel guilty about myself. I feel useless. School isn’t even that hard, it’s just me who’s lazy af, and I hate that.
When I’m not on vacation, I don’t want to spend time doing personal projects, because I don’t want them to distract me; but end up doing nothing because I’m too lazy to do schoolwork. When I’m on vacation, I lose motivation and energy to do the projects I planned when I was in school, so I end up doing nothing as well. I never do anything meaningful to me. I never do anything. I’m useless. Will I ever change? Will I ever stop being useless?
Now I have an overwhelming amount of overdue assignments, that I don’t feel like doing at all. As much as I want to do them, I can’t seem to get them started. The switch to online school made things worse, as now there’s no distinction between classroom and home, between school and personal projects: it’s all messed up.
My brain has a single-core, single-threaded CPU architecture, with a faulty, unstable and inefficient kernel running on top of it, incapable of managing resources, processes and memory reliably. Userland running on top of the kernel is fine, but misconfigured, and permanently forced to work around the kernel problems. The kernel does a really poor job at power management too, so the whole system is always underpowered and unable to execute a lot of demanding tasks.
There’s nothing I can do about the CPU architecture, as it’s non-upgradeable. The kernel is loaded from ROM, so there’s probably not much I can do about it. Upgrading userland components is highly risky, and therefore, most of them are only writeable by traumatic events. What I can do, though, is to fix all the configuration files, reduce clutter and implement workarounds to improve executive functioning; but it requires too much effort and help. I need help.
I feel like there’s a brilliant, visionary and benevolent computer systems engineer and leader inside me, but they’s locked inside my faulty brain. I feel like there has to be a way to set them free. I feel like they can potentially change the world for good, if only they were to escape. I want it to happen so badly, but I have no idea how to make it happen. I’m not sure if I’m good enough. But I’m hopeful that it will happen at some point of my life: the sooner, the better.
I totally suck. I’m not willing to make it like I’m okay and everyone else is wrong about me, because that’s wrong; please don’t tell me that, it will make me depressed only to hear it. I’m not okay. We’re human beings, social creatures, and therefore, to an extent, what others say or think is sometimes right. We were designed by nature to share a common truth, a common sense with those around us. I don’t want to lie to myself, forcing myself to think that I’m okay.
And if your advice goes something like “don’t do what you don’t feel like doing,” then, I don’t think it’s helpful at all: life doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. If I were to follow your advice, maybe I would end up doing nothing at all, failing school, never getting a job, and dying poor because I can’t meet my basic needs. That’s not what I want, most of the time you have to do things you don’t necessarily feel like doing. If you want to do the things you love, you need to do a lot of things you hate.
If your advices goes something like “just stop being lazy” or “you should try harder,” then, you should know it’s not that easy. The difficult part is not figuring out the “what?”, as that’s pretty obvious. The difficult part is rather the “how?”. If you have a patchset that will help fix my configuration files, get rid of the clutter, and implement the required workarounds; or at least you can guide me to write one, then I’m interested. If you can give me a little bit of extra power to function, that would be nice too.