That Sarah Mac

“Miles, meanwhile, found his first semester of algebra almost unbearable. He would look at the equations and he couldn’t make them mean anything, nothing but a spidery scuttling behind his forehead, as if the numbers had turned into insects inside his brain. He would sit there and glare at the problems—or, worse, he would begin to do them and his own solutions would somehow detour onto an unexplainably wrong track, so that for a time he’d believe that he’d finally figured out a method—only to discover that, in fact, x did not equal 41.7. No, x equaled -1, though he had no idea how that was possible. Sitting before a work sheet of these equations, night after night, was the worst fatigue he’d ever experienced, so eventually his mind felt like it had been eaten away into a lace of thin, almost weightless threads.”
― Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply