Okay. But so then. Nothing is so intellectually visceral as failing a test. This visceral is not the satisfying kind of visceral, mind, e.g. tearing apart a mango with your bare hands. I use the word because I think it invokes that fight-or-flight lizard brain which I have been grappling with lately, and the reason that sitting in a dead silent room, scanning seven pages, and realizing that I do not understand a single word upon any of those seven pages is both intellectual and visceral is because pretty much the only thing I want to do is tear ass out of that room. Maybe buy a coffee at the cafe downstairs. Go back to my room and play guitar and read and play video games. And pretty much the only way to get over this, I find, is to Get Shit Together, which entails Knowing Shit, which is an Intellectual Pursuit, which I Just Cannot Manage, Okay, This Is Why I’m Freaking Out in the First Place. And so but then when time’s up and I turn in a test which appears to say, “I did not try very hard at all on this,” I am actually utterly exhausted and defeated from the effort of not tearing ass out of the room, and it turns out, I realize, shouldering my bookbag, really I should have studied more, and doing so, I think, would have put a reasonably sharp stick a reasonable number of inches into the lizard brain, and so really I have no one to blame but myself, but it feels like I’m so stupid I’m not even good enough for that.
