I remember the exact moment math stopped feeling like numbers and started feeling like failure.
Up until junior high, I was good at it. Really good, actually. I understood it quickly, teachers praised me, and I never questioned whether I belonged in the “smart kid” group for math.
Then one year, without warning, the staircase suddenly got steeper.
Concepts got abstract. Steps no longer felt obvious. Homework that once took minutes now took hours. And instead of asking for help or slowing down, I did what a lot of kids quietly do:
I decided something was wrong with me.
Not with the curriculum.
Not with the pace.
Not with the guidance I was getting.
Me.
And once that idea takes root — that you are “not a math person,” “not wired for this,” or “just not good enough” — it spreads fast.
**Confusion became embarrassment.
Embarrassment became fear.
Fear became avoidance.**
And once avoidance shows up, learning stops.
For years, math wasn’t a subject — it was a wound I carried into adulthood. I programmed, I built things, I solved problems for a living… but I always had this quiet insecurity that I had avoided the “real” math. The kind you learn in school. The kind I thought everyone else understood except me.
Then, years later, programming dragged me right back into it.
Algorithms. Complexity. Probability. Trees. Graph theory. Linear algebra in graphics and ML. All the things I once feared were staring me in the face again — except this time, I wasn’t a kid.
And something shocking happened.
**It wasn’t too hard.
It was just unfamiliar.**
All the concepts that once felt like a wall were suddenly… steps.
And all the steps were written down.
In books.
In documentation.
In tutorials.
In lectures I could rewatch as many times as I needed.
Math wasn’t impossible — I had simply been afraid to look stupid long enough to learn it.
That realization changed everything for me:
**Fear makes things feel harder than they are.
Avoidance makes that fear permanent.
But taking a single step toward the thing you fear makes it manageable again.**
If something feels overwhelmingly difficult, it usually means one thing:
You’re learning again.
And learning always starts at zero — even for the people who later look like naturals.
If I could go back and talk to the version of myself who gave up on math in junior high, I’d tell him this:
“You’re not bad at this. You’re just early. Keep going.”
That lesson didn’t just make me better at math.
It made me better at everything.