ANGRY

Update on 6th September 2025

I was about to cancel today's study session as I spent the entire morning desperately crying. I took a pill of Xanax and forced myself to meet my classmates - and it was a great choice. They were all nice, interesting and unbelievably smart. We went to the most beautiful classroom ever and solved some exercises on the blackboard. I, of course, got so anxious I failed to solve the exercise I had already prepared (and solved lol)... They cheered me up and didn't make me feel bad about it. I loved seeing how confident they were, how freely they thought. I felt so inspired and happy, although a little intimidated.

Afterwards, I met up with an old friend. We were together during our bachelor's. After failing his last year because of severe depression, he repeated his year and got his bachelor's during my gap-year, and now we're back in the same class again. He reassured me and told me that he would help me with algebra - and I will probably help him with functional analysis. At some point, we joined my classmates near the Seine and talked about our fears, our hopes, our extremely different backgrounds. I am glad to be surrounded by such amazing people ... I can't wait to talk and study with them. Also, I think I need more than ever someone to cheer me up. My anxiety is so huge I can spend a whole day crying thinking about how dumb I supposedly am. I've been feeling terribly bad for the last two weeks, and as much as I'd like to convince myself that I'm not worthless, it is so deeply engrained in me that for the moment, only the support of other people can help.

Anyhow. It was such an intense week. Now I will try my best, disappear and remerge after my first exam to see how things actually turn out.


Update on 5th September 2025

Enrolled in an algebra course thinking it was going to be about groups and shit. Went to class. Turned out it is all about rings. I've never had a proper course about rings. Professor started right away writing and solving polynomial equations. No definitions, no propositions, no theorems, no structure at all. Didn't understand shit. Saw everyone around me interacting with the professor, ocasionally nodding to his statements. Left the classroom in the middle of the lecture to silently cry in the bathroom. Feeling like an utter failure and now I'm ashamed to join some new classmates I proposed to study (not algebra) with tomorrow. Missing my old friends whom I used to struggle (and succeed) with. Y'all, I think my anxiety was kinda right.


2nd September 2025

Started going back to university yesterday. Tried very hard not to cry during the presentation/meeting thingy. Didn’t cry at uni. Cried in the metro though. Cried at home too. Shed so many tears that I probably got a headache from dehydration. Slept. Woke up this morning and went to uni again. Went back home. Cried. Still crying.

I spent my summer getting back to mathematics, my beloved haven of peace and truth, after waiting for my heart to tell me: “I miss it”. And truly, I think I missed it, because I had a great time with it this summer. I tried to purify my relationship with mathematics by letting it come to me. And now it has been soiled again.

I am not sure where my feelings and thoughts come from, but they are extremely vile. Examples: I shouldn’t choose that course despite liking the subject because I am dumb, I passed all of my precedent courses only because it required being an obedient robot that memorizes without necessarily understanding, I have no creativity so I will never get to do research, I have no deep understanding of anything so I will never be able to teach, etc. I am constantly making up absolutely absurd and unnecessary assertions about myself. These thoughts are paralyzing me in a way I’ve never seen before – to the point where I’m not even desperate but rather fed up. I want to study; I don’t want try to convince myself for the nth time that I’m not a piece of shit. Mathematics studies used to be about mathematics. Now they’re all about me. Everything echoes my supposed incompetence. And I am well aware that all of my negative thoughts are absurd – if only this awareness could suffice to silence my inner voice! Sometimes, I even weaponize this awareness to feel even more powerless: “you’re telling bullshit to yourself, you know that it is bullshit, and you still believe it – only someone as stupid as you could believe something they know is false”.

I
don’t
know
what
to
do.