drafting "Student Dysphoria"

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 There was a brief, beautiful moment from 2014, the first year of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), until mid-2016—a year-and-a-half long moment when I _didn't_ have to fight a desperate and obviously hopeless [ideological war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) of survival against a Society that's _trying to kill me_.
 
-(Technically, trying to impose the use of [gerrymandered](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) that raise the [message length](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) of my existence in social reality, which is the same thing as lowering the probability social reality assigns to my existence. Like I said, _trying to kill me_.)
+(Technically, trying to impose the use of [gerrymandered](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) that raise the [message length](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) of my existence in social reality, which is the same thing as lowering the probability that social reality assigns to my existence. Like I said, _trying to kill me_.)
 
 Peacetime was _amazing_. I was so happy—not ecstatic, but happy in the ordinary way of moral patient, someone whose life is valuable simply in the experience of living of it, rather than for its effects on some grand Cause. I [wrote a _chess engine_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/minimax-search-and-the-structure-of-cognition/); I [gave money to _charity_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/); I [drank _pumpkin spice_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/) and played that tower defense game where the bad ponies are the good ponies and the good ponies are the bad ponies.
 
 That carefree selfishness is gone now, subordinated to the war effort. And so soon after the last war, too.
 
-The first shots of the last war came in December 2007. I was a schoolstudent at the University in Santa Cruz. Coming into that quarter, I had been excited to take the famous "Introduction to Feminisms" course, only to find, as the quarter wore on, that it seemed to be taught in a dialect of English I could not speak.
+The first shots of the last war came in December 2007. I was a schoolstudent at the University in Santa Cruz. Coming into that quarter, I had been excited to take the famous "Introduction to Feminisms" course, only to find, as the quarter wore on, that it seemed to be taught in a dialect of English I could not speak. The texts and the professor kept describing features of Society as _oppression_ as if simply to condemn them. I agreed with the condemnation, of course, but I couldn't understand it as _knowledge_ and could not produce such sentences in my own voice; I wanted an explanation of how the oppression _worked_.
+
+My subsequent difficulty in writing the required papers for that course weighed on my soul. The failure to live up to expectations would have been shameful for any course, but as a _male_ squandering the privilege of being allowed to take "Introduction to Feminisms", it was simply unbearable. Unable to reach the prescribed word count for the final paper, I had a hysterical nervous breakdown at the end of the quarter, crying and screaming for hours, "I betrayed them; I betrayed them." (The professor and the T.A., who were kind and deserved better than to have to teach a male who _couldn't write_.)
+
+Outline—
+
+ * it became clear that I needed to leave University (prodigal son)
+ * working at the supermarket
+ * Heald
+ * mental issues with school
+ * taking differential equations for fun
+ * humiliation, feeling that now I had to finish the degree, to prove that I could
+ * boiling rage all the time
+ * student dysphoria analogy
+
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