For years, I carried a quiet insecurity that I had gotten away with something.
I was a programmer. A good one.
But I didn’t have a traditional computer science degree, and I had a long, unhealed history of feeling like I had “failed” at math in junior high.
So deep down, I thought:
“One day, the real math is going to catch up to me.”
And then it did.
Except the story didn’t end the way I expected.
Programming eventually drags you back to the concepts you dodged
You can go a long time writing software without touching heavy math.
But sooner or later, the fundamentals show up again:
- Algorithms
- Big O notation
- Trees and graphs
- Recursion
- Probability
- Hashing and collisions
- Memory models
- Linear algebra in graphics and ML
- State machines and logic
These aren’t optional—they’re the backbone of how computers think.
And when those topics finally landed on my desk, I braced for impact.
I expected the same panic I felt as a kid when math “got too hard.”
Instead, something shocking happened:
I understood it.
Not instantly. Not magically.
But clearly. Methodically. Surprisingly well.
There was no wall this time.
Just steps.
It wasn’t the math that changed — it was me
When I was younger, I confused difficulty with inadequacy.
As an adult, I had context.
I had patience.
I had frameworks for thinking.
I had the ability to slow down and learn deliberately.
I had the humility to be a beginner again.
And with those things, the concepts I once feared weren’t intimidating—they were logical.
Whatever abilities I thought I lacked weren’t missing.
They were dormant.
Self-taught doesn’t mean underprepared — it means unstructured
People act like a CS degree gives you sacred knowledge.
But here’s the truth I wish I’d known sooner:
Everything taught in computer science is written down—publicly, accessibly, and thoroughly.
There are textbooks, lectures, tutorials, walkthroughs, GitHub repositories, and entire college courses uploaded for free.
The gap between someone with a degree and someone without one isn’t intelligence.
It’s structure.
And structure is replaceable.
Once I realized that, something big clicked:
I wasn’t “getting lucky” by understanding things.
I wasn’t faking it.
I wasn’t behind.
I was learning the same material—just later, and in a different order.
Relearning math through programming made something else obvious
Every concept I feared as a kid…
- recursion
- algebraic structures
- logic
- proofs
- transformations
- probabilities
…was not actually hard.
It was just unfamiliar.
And unfamiliarity feels like difficulty until you break it into steps.
Programming forced me to revisit the math I had abandoned, but it didn’t expose my weaknesses—it exposed the lie I had believed:
**I wasn’t bad at math.
I was just afraid of it—and fear had been doing the talking.**
The farther I went into programming, the more the fear dissolved
Because each new concept reinforced the same truth:
- These ideas are learnable.
- They are finite.
- They are documented.
- They make sense when taught well.
- They reward patience, not talent.
The more I learned, the more obvious it became that the limitation wasn’t capability—it was confidence.
Fear kept me out. Learning brought me back.
If you avoided math when you were younger, programming will eventually bring you face-to-face with it.
But here’s the part no one tells you:
When you meet it again as an adult, you won’t meet it as the scared kid who backed away.
You’ll meet it with experience.
With context.
With resilience.
With curiosity.
With the ability to slow down.
And that changes everything.
Because once the fear is gone, math stops being a monster in the closet and becomes what it always was:
Just another language.
Just another pattern.
Just another staircase of small, learnable steps.
And you can climb it—any time you choose.