emacs is hard

Every time I try to get seriously into Emacs to configure it for my needs, my brain starts to hurt. A shocking, public confession: I am probably too dumb to grok Emacs. Phew... that moved a stone from my chest, it had to be said... I can spend hours configuring my Emacs and I feel that I'm not getting anywhere. It's even worse at home on a Windows box (whatever sane behavior Xemacs exhibits on Unices goes away on WinXP). Problem is, Emacs is the only normal, free IDE for Lisp hacking around.