I am also currently in a “notoriously hard” physics class at an engineering university, in fact the second most failed class in the school. My saving grace was having had a really good, engineering based algebraic physics class in high school with an awesome teacher (my professor in my current physics class is disorganized and hard to understand). Try to see whether there is a basic intro physics class that is algebra based (if you are at a school that has a liberal arts population there probably is one for non engineering majors so the liberal arts majors can get their science requirement), even if it is not for credit, so you have a framework of concepts and relationships (because most of what physics is is relationships between properties of objects) to combine with the calculus concepts.