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Here's the problem: I have a neurological condition that, among other things, makes me hypersensitive to a lot of things.

I quit smoking once back in 2009, before the condition started, and aside from a nasty-feeling nervous energy for a few days, nothing much bad happened.

I picked it up again in 2012 when my mother had a couple of strokes and passed away. To top that off, I had to knock down a nasty staph infection in my arm. The stress was, well, unbelievable.

At the end of 2012, I tore up my back really badly. It's pretty much screwed up my whole body and really messed with my central nervous system. Body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, everything.

Whenever I try to quit smoking, I feel like I'm being electrocuted. My body goes completely haywire, and I want to commit suicide. The worst part is, it won't stop. Last time, it went on for weeks with no end in sight.

Nicotine patches, gum, e-cigs, they do nothing. The money isn't there for those stop-smoking drugs, and I don't think I could take them anyway. There are so many horror stories of hallucinations and suicides, and I'm very susceptible to that sort of thing.

I just don't know what to do. I can't support my smoking habit, but if I just quit cold turkey there is a very real chance that the withdrawals could end up killing me.

I've been trying to learn simple, basic programming concepts for a good twenty years, and I'm no better than when I started. You name it, I've tried it. C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python...

The problem is, even the most basic problem-solving skills and proper syntax completely elude me.

For example, I'm going through the Python course at codeacademy.com. At first, it wasn't terrible. But after the first lessons, things pretty much started going downhill. I've had to check the forums for answers to over half the problems presented. When I found the answers, it seemed like I had made the most idiotic mistakes. But I guarantee you, I could've stared at it for a million years and I'd have never caught a single one of them.

How in the hell is this so EASY for other people? Every time somebody says programming is easy, I want to jam a pencil in their eye.

Seriously, even when I do an exercise right, every single thing I learned literally vanishes from my mind in minutes. It gets to the point that even a few exercises later, I don't have a stinking clue what I'm looking at.

Even if I go back over the exercises again and again, solutions that I had found once will elude me again, and I'll end up staring at that screen like a gorilla on downers.

Am I a complete moron or something? Or is there just a part of my brain that is missing?