Did Math Make You Smarter? Did Math Give You A Better Life? How?

Any inspiring stories out there?

I'll skip the trauma dump and get straight to facts. I was supposed to be "gifted" when I was a kid because I picked up some skills and conceptual thinking early on that were impressive to people, but somehow things got fucked up around freshman year of highschool psychologically/developmentally/etc and I became the failure. However, I worked on myself, picked up the pieces, and deadset on getting my degree in CS. I'm 24, and I'm taking precalc in college. . I developed this new mindset around learning and a new enthusiasm for learning math as I think understanding math intuitively at a higher level is going to make me a better problem solver lead to a better life financially and allow me to get some amount of respect from society. Not to mention the insight to work on solutions to greater problems.

However, I keep having negative intrusive thoughts of being so "far behind" and I messed up the past 2 weeks have not been keeping up with lectures and I have a test tomorrow I'm almost certainly going to bomb. I thought I was going to do really well on my first exam, was even confident about it when I finished and I bombed it I got a 65. This exam I'm not confident at all and I know I don't know the material so I shudder to think how it's going to go.

I kind of need....reassurance that I'm doing the right thing here, instead of cutting my losses and getting a business degree or something.

Maybe people who have fulfilling careers, or had similar problems and were late bloomers to tell me there is a light on the other end of the tunnel and I'm not fucked and destined to be a dysfunctional idiot because I should have learned ap calculus at 18 and gone to MIT and been working at Google by now.

Sometimes math seems endless and overwhelming, and I can't learn fast enough.

Also, sometimes I feel like I'm not really learning to solve problems, just kind of spitting out solutions I've learned. Almost certainly have the suspicion that despite getting an A in intermediate algebra my fundamentals are not strong at all.

Edit: The support and positivity here is off the charts. Big fan of math people. Thank you all <3

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