A Not So Beautiful Mind

It's abundantly obvious that I suck at math. Since third-grade when my teacher specifically set up a conference with my mother to explain that I was falling behind my classmates. Apparently natural ability got me through first and second grade, but that no longer cut it in the big 3. She handed my mother the assignments I had not completed: 8 days worth of math homework. And the rest is history. Nothing plagued me worse in school than math. (Actually, upon closer reflection, even though I took advanced classes, I struggled in school from 3rd-9th grade. I was the academic failure of the family.) Let's be perfectly frank here: If I were good at math, I would currently be in Med School.
Yet, I've noticed over the course of my accounting class that because of simple arithmetic relationships between the balance sheets, accounts, relationships between certain cash flows and certain other figures on income and such...I was forced to think in ways I never had to think before (although upon reflection they were startlingly simple.) And it is difficult, but after the flash of understanding and mini-epiphanies about the relationships, I feel like I've burned a new groove into my thought processes. A completely new way of thinking. In a minor respect, I think that this is the same type of radical push that happens when a political scientist or lawyer is forced to learn economics for the first time. Adding the quantitative aspects of a qualitative problem create an entirely new dimension of understanding...a shift from seeing the world in 2D to seeing it in 3D. (My own meager economics understanding has now been downgraded to such an extent that I think I'm seeing the world in 2.2D, or maybe 2.5D. Certainly not a 3.)

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if my inability to do math is something I've conditioned myself to believe, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Up to this point I have been quite unwilling to consider math and quantitative modes of analysis on by vaguely and automatically invoking the hokey principle that "I suck at math." And it's true. And I've sucked more and more at it as, with the exception of the econ minor which I barely barely understood, I've ignored it for the past (holy shit) 7 years. I didn't even challenge it after I made that choice in 3rd grade. I've let an entirely crucial and integral aspect of understanding and analysis go to seed because I've actually been too lazy to face up to the challenge of struggling with it. That needs to be fixed.

Of course, this will putter out within a week's time as I try to do a geometry problem and end up crying and drunk in my bathtub, but I think it's time I sucked it up and stopped running from important things and pretending that there is some principled reason for my lazy aversion.

The question that lingers though, is the role of natural ability in mathematical thinking, which has always kept me away from it. Part of me is entirely aware that any mental ability, agility, and the force of intellect is something that has to be honed, to be developed, and that requires constant challenge. (This is hopefully what I will adhere to.) The other part of me clearly recognizes that mathematical geniuses in the extreme, are born, not bred. Anybody?