Apologies for the delay since my last post, I've submitted two papers in the past two months and have needed the time to recover.

I've spent a bit of time the last week re-learning math concepts that I encountered or nearly encountered during undergrad, motivated by a desire to understand machine learning better since I would like to build some fun interfaces that surprise me as the user. This has brought some emotions to the surface.

Since I doubt anyone reading this knew me in undergrad (there are people reading this, right?), I feel that I need to provide some context. I was a terrible student for most of my undergrad to the point where I probably should have suspended my studies. I was very depressed, on medication that left me completely exhausted, and unknowingly had some kind of neurodivergence (the smart money is on autism and auditory processing disorder) that made it very difficult to get anything out of large lectures. I barely passed many of my classes from intense study n the lead-up to exams, and abandoned a math minor that I really wanted to pursue because I couldn't reliably attend class and couldn't cram in the same way.

I've felt insecure about this period of my life for years. Quite unreasonably, I've spent a lot of my life feeling like my value as a person comes from "being good at STEM". I was able to get through the assessments, but this kind of cramming did not give me a solid understanding of the concepts being taught, especially those that are more theoretical. Even as I took more classes and did quite well once my situation improved, I had the sense that I was building upon a faulty foundation, and could never find the time or resources to fix it.

As an aside, I may actually be bad at math. I've attempted a few times to re-learn certain concepts, especially statistics and linear algebra, and struggled as I fail to keep straight in my mind what the notation means. The tendency for the writers of math textbooks to present important equations with little explanation of what they mean or how they were derived also makes me feel as if I am missing the part of my brain that can learn math. If any neuroscientists are reading, I do understand that cognition is far more complicated than this, and you do not need to write to me.

In any case, this time it felt different to crack open some textbooks, read some papers, and watch some YouTube videos. It's been so many years since I would have learned these concepts that I probably would have forgotten them by now anyway due to a lack of use! And it feels like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I can just learn this because I think it's interesting, I no longer feel obligated to already know it. It feels wonderful. I doubt I'm making great progress, but nobody cares and I am free.