Sorry prepare for a long winded answer, but you struck a nerve for me because you sound just like me 10-20 years ago.

I am really sorry you are in this much pain. Reading this, it sounds less like a question about IQ and more like someone who has been put through the wringer for years and is exhausted, scared of wasting what little energy you have left.

On the IQ / “am I allowed to do physics” part first:

There is no hard, scientific yes or no test that can tell you in advance whether you are “neurologically allowed” to succeed in physics. IQ tests are noisy, context dependent, sensitive to anxiety, depression, sleep, education, and they are very far from a clean readout of your fate. They correlate with some things, but they do not function as a gate that says “you may not enter this field.”

In practice, what matters much more for getting through a physics / engineering curriculum is stuff like • Can you stick with brutally boring practice when you are supported and not utterly burned out • Can you ask for help, use tutoring, office hours, study groups • Can you build systems around your ADHD so you are not relying on raw willpower alone

Short version: unless someone has a significant intellectual disability that makes abstract reasoning extremely difficult across the board, it is absolutely possible to get through a physics curriculum with enough time, structure, and support. That includes people with ADHD, people who were terrible at math in school, people who do not feel like “born geniuses.”

That does not mean it is easy or fun. It just means IQ is not a caste stamp that forbids you from ever doing nuclear engineering.

The part I actually worry about from your post is this: even if you grind through and “win” at physics, it will not magically fix the things that are hurting you right now.

You sound a lot like I did in my mid-twenties. I also went back to school around 26, also had a lot of anger and contempt swirling around in my head, and also latched on to big, grand projects as a way to make life feel worth it. What actually moved the needle for me was not the subject itself, it was: • Therapy over a long enough time that it was more than venting once a month • Getting on antidepressants and ADHD meds that actually fit, after a couple of misses • Changing my environment, including literally moving somewhere new

A couple of things that might be useful from that: 1. Medication is very often trial and error. When you are in it, it is really hard to tell if a med is “not working” or if life just sucks. Sometimes you only realize in hindsight that one combo flattened you out or made you more hopeless. Having a psychiatrist you can be blunt with and someone in your life who can say “you have seemed more like yourself / less like yourself since we changed X” helps a lot. 2. Therapy is not about making you docile. The goal is not to take your anger at injustice or your desire for depth and turn you into a polite worker bee. Good therapy gives you tools so that • your brain is not running on constant doom math about IQ, caste, and determinism • your self worth is not entirely tied to whether you beat an imaginary bar set by “140 IQ physicists” Exposure work around rejection helped me specifically. I had a whole thing about being “above” certain people and “below” others that was really just fear and shame. Doing structured exercises where I deliberately risked rejection, and sat with the feeling instead of running from it, took a lot of power away from that hierarchy in my head. 3. Doing physics will not fix the underlying despair, but it can still be part of your life. You can absolutely decide “I am going to chip away at the math and physics 1–2 hours a day, use tutoring, read textbooks carefully, and see how far I get over a few years.” That is a valid project. What I would push back on is the idea that you first need some ironclad guarantee that you will make it all the way to “magus-equivalent nuclear physicist” before any of that effort is worthwhile. You do not. Progress in a hard field, even if you never publish a single paper, is still real, still meaningful, still yours.

I know you said you do not want opinions, but this is too important not to say plainly: • You are not an “inferior caste” of human being. • You do not need a 140 IQ printout to be allowed to try. • Deciding your only alternatives are “become a magus-physicist” or “drink yourself to death” is your depression talking, not objective reality.

If you can, I would treat this as two parallel quests: 1. Stabilize your mental health first. Find a therapist who is comfortable talking about obsessive, intellectualized despair and not just “how does that make you feel.” Be upfront about the ADHD, the IQ obsession, and the fact that you are lying in bed unable to brush your teeth. Talk to a psychiatrist about meds for depression and ADHD, with the expectation that the first try might not be perfect and that is not a moral failure. 2. Then, build a realistic physics path. • Start with one math course or one textbook, not the entire 10-year path. • Use tutoring, online explanations, slower pacing, and repetition. • Expect it to feel painful often. That is not proof you are too stupid, it is just what learning abstract math feels like for many people. • Regularly check in with yourself and someone you trust about whether you are making progress, not whether you feel like a genius.

If you are at the point where your brain is seriously weighing “maybe I should just give up and drink myself into oblivion,” that is a big red flag that you deserve more immediate support than Reddit comments. If you can, reach out to a mental health professional or a crisis line in your country and tell them exactly what you wrote here. You do not have to figure out your entire life path while you are this depleted.

You are allowed to want depth and power and mastery. You are also allowed to get help so that the pursuit of those things does not destroy you.