In math class, the chalk dust settles like flour on a counter. The teacher writes a new equation, and I copy it down the way I once copied instructions from the back of a box: preheat, combine, wait. There is comfort in the certainty of steps, but also a dull resentment. I am not discovering anything. I am reenacting a decision someone smarter, earlier, more patient already made. The proof is not mine. The genius is absent, leaving only directions.

Hands sticky with sugar, eyes scanning for what came next. I baked this way, trusting that if I followed the steps faithfully, something delicious would emerge. And it usually did. But the pleasure was borrowed. The recipe had already survived its failures. I was only the final witness. Math feels like that: I stir symbols that were stabilized long ago, hoping the result rises because it has risen for everyone else.

This makes frustration bloom. I want credit for effort, not just accuracy. I want the warmth of invention, not the lukewarm assurance of correctness. It seems unfair that the hardest part, that is, the thinking, has already been done, and all that remains is obedience.

Yet there is another truth hovering beneath the surface. Minds that race ahead sometimes trip on their own speed. The more intricate the thinking, the more habits knot themselves into deep dependency. Meanwhile, simpler patterns, repeated steadily, can loosen a grip more easily than brilliance ever could. The smarter I grow, the more difficult it is to break an addiction that revolves around achievement, and I partly want to be young again because I’d be naive enough to not need the pleasure of becoming somehow advanced myself. Complexity does not always mean freedom.

And boredom changes its texture when I stop resisting it. Loneliness isn’t the function of solitude. If I lean all the way into the repetition, if I attend closely to each dull step, the dullness thins. The equation begins to whirr. The recipe starts to smell like something alive. Concentration becomes a kind of rebellion. I may not be the original mind behind these instructions, but in giving them my full attention, I claim a quieter authorship: the patience to stay, to finish, to learn why the steps work at all.