Apologies for the clickbaity dramatic title here. I just claimed my certificate but I don’t really ‘feel’ like I earned it. I followed along with Ramon but I can’t honestly say that I could recreate the solutions myself. FreeCodeCamp is really tough!
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I can relate to you. In the first weeks, I followed along, but then I managed to catch up with the exercises and tried to get things done before class. - Occasionally, I had to look at the hints to get the solution and often enough, I had spent 20 minutes on an exercise and Ramón would solve it in 2-3 minutes and I felt so stupid! 
It was important to me to get my projects done on my own before watching the live stream, to avoid getting exactly into that feeling of “I cannot do this on my own”.
I haven’t even claimed my certificate yet (I still feel I haven’t earned it), I first want to finish all the exercises. I currently have 9 left in the Intermediate Algorithms section.
But tell you what? Yesterday I finished one of the exercises and I used filter and reduce and even a recursion all on my own!* ( I probably sound like a child saying “Look Mum, I put on my socks all on my own!” But I gave myself a little recursion patpat for that! - Thanks Ramon for teaching us to patpat!!)
At first, I wasn’t even sure whether to continue with the class, because it doesn’t include DOM manipulation and you’re right, it IS tough! But because Ramón has this positive attitude and the community support (seeing that other people are struggling, too, it’s not just me being stupid) made me decide to pull through!!
What if you just go through the exercises again, not right now, when you still feel you’re just remembering from class, but after a while, and do things on your own so you can see that you’re able to do it? (And I’m very confident that you are!)
In fact, I’m planning to do that myself, because I feel time was too short to remember everything.
As I’m doing the remaining exercises now, I have the exercise in one tab, w3schools JS reference in another, and the class overview in one more tab, so I can always go back to the section where we first learned something, like “oh, maybe I can use that method here? how did that work again? what parameters does it take?”
And I think it’s ok, I’m still learning.
*EDIT: I should have been clearer here: By “all on my own” I don’t mean I didn’t need to look up the syntax. I just meant without someone telling me ‘use reduce() for this’ , but myself thinking “maybe this could be done with filter()? maybe recursion for that one?” - just not everything’s a for-loop anymore. 
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Yes! All this.
Me, wrecking my head over a challenge for hours when Ramón does it in 5 minutes. The feeling of "I would never be able to figure this out on my own. We all have it. There should be a pamphlet: “The various stages of grief when learning JS”
I’ve only just recently reached a point where doing the JS exercises has changed from “I’m so stupid and inadequat and will never never learn this” to “This is a really fun puzzle and I’m looking forward to figuring it out”.
I still need to look things up. But where before I had to look at the whole solution and try to understand that, now only a hint of one keyword is enough for me to reach my own solution. And that will come for everybody. The only problem is, it takes a lot longer than we would like. So in the meantime we tend to believe that we’re stupid and just not getting it.
Your advise, @ilona is very good. Go over the exercises again with maybe a week in between them. The Algorithm Scripting sections I found the most useful for really internalising and applying everything that is JS.
Also, point out to yourself when you’ve made progress. Everytime you notice that you did something very easily, like writing a for loop, using filter or a recursion, make a big deal out of. Remember how a while ago you had to look up every part of the syntax and struggled to understand it. And now you’re writing it like it’s nothing. All comes back to Pat Pat!
Interesting point about the DOM interaction. I also find, the curriculum is lacking in that respect. My previous experience with JS was a lot more integrated. So actually applying it to websites and app, which helps a lot - especially as a beginner - to see the use and relevance of it. But I am glad I did this bootcamp as it went beyond just scratching the surface. Yes, it is hard. Which is even more reason to be proud that we did it. This is some pretty advanced stuff we’ve been going through (very rapidly!) and some of us for the first time. That’s awesome!
So @garymeade667209 and everybody: doesn’t matter if right now you feel like you haven’t earned the cert. You’ve worked hard on it and from here on out you will only get better.
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