Apropos nothing (a lie, of course—it almost always is), I am once again noticing how incoherent and ad hoc my areas of knowledge and expertise seem to be. I can’t help getting the sense when approaching a topic such as linear algebra—which I use a lot and have been in various ways for literally decades—that everything I know about it is sort of cobbled together, accreted erratically—perhaps organically would be more charitable—jury-rigged from disparate, disreputable sources on a strictly need to know basis. Whereas every other user has—surely—learned the subject in a nice clean, well-structured and elegant fashion, built up piece by precision-engineered piece from rock solid foundations to flying buttresses, assembled into an unassailable edifice of logic and proof.
Or so I imagine.
Where is your beautiful theory?
This is just an example, of course. The same applies to everything from finance to pharmacology, modelling to music, arsehole to breakfast time. I know, or at least have known, a lot of things, a lot of fragments and random bits of stuff, but it doesn’t feel like it all adds up to anything very systematic or lucid, anything that could be persuasively interpreted as understanding.
Or it’s just routine imposter syndrome rearing its head again, as the new term looms with its complement of new tasks. I’m basically gaslighting myself at this point. I should probably stop.