math is my white whale. this is a personal long ass essay about academia. tl;dr

As far as emotional and mental development goes, math (yes, math, the academic subject. arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry. math.) has probably had a bigger impact on me than anything else.

Math was always there in my childhood. I learned the multiplication tables as I hugged my dad tightly on the back of his motorbike, zooming through congested urban freeway traffic. My weekend mornings were filled not with cartoons but with math puzzles, with magic squares and Fibonacci numbers. Granted, I think that was a cultural thing. My dad sold his motorbike before we moved here and I don’t even know if there are any Chinese-government-approved cartoons to air on weekend mornings.

When I got to middle school though, math pushed and shoved everything else aside and clasped its strong spidery fingers around my little adolescent mind. Math was…simple isn’t the right word, because math has never been simple. Math was just natural, I guess. I could always find the value of x.

Even though it’s obviously already gotten personally embedded (c’mon, all my childhood memories with my dad had to do with math. I don’t have daddy issues. I have fucking math issues.), this is the key: as an awkward middle-schooler, math was kind of my validation for existing. I mean, being good at math grew to define me (this became more annoying than cool when boys started liking girls and all the boys who would like girls who liked math— well they also liked math. They liked math more than girls.) and everything else was irrelevant because I had found this innate thing within me that came as naturally as breathing.

But then other things happened and by the end of high school, math didn’t really anchor my self-esteem anymore. I realized that I was more than a calculator, and soon I didn’t consider my strongest skill to be math. I didn’t like my high school math classes much. It wasn’t even the whole girls-are-discouraged-to-like-math thing, nor was it because I wasn’t good at it. Other interests just took precedence over it.  I stopped doing math competitions, stopped doing math outside of school, I even opted out of math my senior year. I came into college thinking I wouldn’t major in anything other than the social sciences and at the end of fall quarter, dropped calc because I was done with the math core.

Then over winter break I decided to add 153. why not. I had room in my schedule.

Today I took the hardest fucking final of my life. 10 pages, 2 hours. I’m done with college calculus.

BUT I DON’T THINK I CAN GIVE UP MATH. 

In the past year, I hated math. I hated it with a passion. I want to take my textbook, throw it from one end of Harper reading room to the other, stomp on it, tear out the pages, primitively and angrily first, then agonizingly slowly, so it can feel its thin delicate pages rip and suffer. I want to kick it down the street until I reach the Point, then throw it into Lake Michigan so that its already worn cover and whatever is left of the insides will turn into a helpless soggy wreck. Then I want to throw it into an incinerator. 

I hated math. I hated it with a passion. I’ve also never loved hating something so much in my life.

They say to study what you’re passionate about, but what if you’re passionate about disliking something?

Of course, nothing else really matches the feeling you get when you prove some obscure theorem. Or when you finally simplify the integral into a concise xe^x + C. That lightbulb ding, yeah I guess that’s pretty cool too. Let’s be real. I can’t not take math. Even though I’ll probably drop it for stats, I’m currently enrolled in Intro to Analysis, a class I don’t need to take. I’ve already used one elective this quarter to take calculus. Is this voluntary math-taking ever going to stop?

It sounds so stupid to be so sentimental and attached to something like a stuffy and boring academic subject, but I can’t let go. I hate it when physics/chem/engineering majors get all haughty about the humanities and social sciences, but the truth is, I never feel smarter than when I have math psets to do. I never feel dumber than when I’m doing math either, but also never smarter. This isn’t just a culturally ingrained Asian girl loves math deal. If I wanted to make my Asian family happy, I’d be a Bio or Comp Sci major. I’d go to a pre-professional university. This is closer to home than that. My parents were both math majors. I did math competitions as a kid…and liked them. I feel like I was born to do math, but I’m also so so so deathly afraid that I don’t have the innate mental capacity to be good at it. 

I know I’m just rambling. I know how this will turn out. I’m going to take 199, if not spring then fall next year. Then I’ll either end up a math major despite all my vehement denial, or I might finally be able to drop calculus for good.