In my case because I was in gifted classes so I got this idea that I was just brilliant and never needed to study for anything. Then as soon as a subject got hard enough for me to not ace it without effort I just quit instead of knuckling down and doing the work. Math was the only subject where I truly ran into a wall cause some of that stuff is just not at all intuitive, it’s loaded down with obscure rules and memorization, etc.

It felt less like instruction on how to use a vital tool to make my life easier and more like someone was intentionally making my life harder by making me learn math. It’s like someone came up to me and said ‘Oh, you’re walking 10 miles uphill? Here, since you’re going this way, carry this 40lb rock with you. it’ll be real useful at the end, trust me bro.’ And I was like ‘This is already a hard enough walk, the fuck am I carrying this rock for?’ so I set it down.

I have since picked some of it back up, and I now recognize the utility of learning it and wish I’d learned it when I was younger cause it’s even harder now.