Oh boy, do I got a few things to say - I guess I was never supposed to be good at math, I was too distracted looking out the sunny class windows to pay any attention to the algebraic equations being scribbled on the blackboard by my 8th grade math teacher. Midterms come and I come up with a brilliant plan to cheat through it, I almost feel smug. Since I can’t memorize these algebraic equations, I write all these stupid formulas on small sheets of paper and hide them, one under my transparent but tinted writing board, and another in the fold of my sleeve. As I keep me eye at the door to see if the teacher is coming, this sonnovabitch peers in through the damn windows and catches me red handed. As he’s walking me to the principal’s office, the other cheatsheet falls off my sleeve too. My engineer dad decides to teach me math over the next few months, and he does so with some tough love, but then I realize something - math is a system, and it’s very logical and it makes just too much sense, and if you keep following logic and truth, you will arrive at your answer, no matter how hard the problem. I graduated high school with a graduating nickname of math whiz, yes how nerdy, but look at the transformation.

Three decades later, my autistic kid would stumble and struggle at the same exact gates of math hell in 7th grade algebra like a true carbon copy. I tell her you have it in you to conquer this, but she refuses to believe me. I realize she was in a bad school with a terrible math teacher. I force change schools over the summer. I tell her it’s a system and that you need to practice and that is how you will gain confidence. She put in the hard work and understood the system and now tops her class in math. Her friends from her old school on the other hand think they are shit at math and it is because they don’t have it in them. It’s such a delicate line between being a math whiz and going all your life thinking you don’t get it.