After one especially long evening of growling at my chemistry homework, my roommate finally forced me out of the room for dinner. “Why do you hate chemistry?” she asked, presumably as she dragged me away while I continued to hiss at the titration problem still up on my laptop.
“Well. I’m awful at chemistry.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s why?”
“I also hate the subject. I hated it in high school, too. I failed half the tests.”
“Oh, so you don’t actually hate it. You just think you do, because you didn’t do well.”
“No, no. I get bad grades because I hate it. I don’t hate it because I get bad grades.”
But then I thought about it. Chemistry coincidentally happened to be both my hardest class and my most hated class. Maybe there was some correlation -- maybe I did hate it just because it was hard, rather than for the subject itself. It was some form of ego protection, in a way. If I just keep telling myself that I hate it, then I spend less time on it, which creates a sort of external excuse as to why I do badly on it. It completely avoids anyone from making the conclusion that maybe I’m genuinely just straight up stupid.
It was my first ever struggle in high school, the first time I ever had to cross my fingers that I would pass the tests, much less actually get a good grade. Maybe that hurt my pride.
“I have a solution. Stop hating it so much,” my roommate proposed.
“You can’t just stop hating something voluntarily!” I hollered back with great distress. If you could measure my hatred for chemistry in terms of acidity, it would be at a pH of -20. No way was “Not hating it so much” going to be a solution. In fact, I didn’t even want a “solution.” There were enough solutions in chemistry death lab.
“You can at least try!”
And so, grumbling, I plopped back down into my seat, somewhat grudgingly prepared to try to let chemistry into my hardened heart. It didn’t exactly work. The subject was still boring as ever. The problems still took me hours to do. But a small something had changed, somehow. I had accepted something. (Just like a Bronsted base!)
I had accepted the fact that chemistry was going to be hard for me. Instead of a push and pull about how to hide the fact that I had no idea what the hell was going on in chemistry, I decided that it would be better to confront chemistry head on and openly flaunt my complete lack of understanding. Perhaps that seems obvious, but it never has been for me. Even less so in college, where we’re all surrounded by people who do know exactly what they’re doing, and it’s easy to disappear into the crowds of students in 400-person lecture halls.
It’s such a cliche saying that you shouldn’t hate something just because it’s hard, but it’s really hard not to hate things that we’re bad at, because pride is universally a very human trait. But realizing that it’s your pride and your embarrassment of failure that’s in the way, rather than anything else, is the first step.
