I think one of the reasons that I am terrible at operational math is that I either know the answer or I do not.

No amount of reasoning will get me from the problem to the answer as I don’t really reason about anything in math, or with words, or even with any sort of related problems in general.

I just look at something and it’s just obvious or I’ll never know it. In areas with muscle memory — like playing music — that is not true, luckily. I do learn there, especially if it’s to do with my hands.

So that’s why I sometimes look like a mega-genius and other times like a complete dunce. That problem you were working on for six hours? Yeah, I’ll just walk over to your desk and tell you how to solve it in 15 seconds. The answer’s just obvious to me. I don’t know where the solution came from. It’s just there. No thought required.

But ask me to solve a math problem, and even if you explain to me a thousand times the steps it takes to do it, it never makes any impression and similar problems never look equivalent enough to me to guess that I should use the same methods. And I never know why I should use those methods and not others, or what the differences are between dissimilar problems, or why I shouldn’t just use some ligatures to make the numbers look prettier, nor why I just can’t abandon the whole futile enterpise and instead endeavor to ascertain why I’m even attempting to solve such boring garbage in the first place.

That’s when I look like an utter oaf.