Revelation

I’ve had a personal revelation lately. I suddenly realized that something I had believed about myself was simply not true, and never had been. It’s an unsettling experience, but ultimately liberating. This thought suddenly popped into my head, and I immediately knew it was true at some gut level, but my rational mind has had trouble accepting it because it undermines a big chunk of my self-identity. It took a fair bit of analysis — dusting off old memories and looking at them afresh through a new lens, reviewing my behavior and emotional reactions — before I could really bring myself to believe it. Even now, I catch myself thinking, “That can’t really be true, can it?” But it’s like finding the clue that unravels a mystery. All these little pieces suddenly snapped into place: Odd, inconsistent bits of evidence that had been shoved aside or swept under the rug suddenly made sense.

I don’t like math.

This is weird. I’ve always self-identified as a math geek. I was a math major in college. I’m a software developer now, which is usually thought of as some branch of math (by my university at the very least, since my diploma says “Mathematics (Computer Science)”). If you asked me to describe myself academically, I’d have said, “good at math, bad at English and history.” But looking back, I don’t think I ever actually enjoyed doing math. I never sat down for an afternoon and did a whole bunch of calculus problems just for the fun of it.

I majored in math because it took the least amount of actual effort, not because it was something that I enjoyed putting effort into. I was quite clever and appallingly lazy, and math will let you get away with that for longer than any other field. Not that I even did particularly well in my math classes, but I was able to muddle through with a minimal amount of studying. Maybe if I had to learn math now for work, with real-world problems to solve, I’d get into it and do reasonably well, but at the time in an academic setting, I just didn’t care.

To be clear, writing software isn’t math, at least not the kind I do. What I do is all about people. Code is instructions for a computer, but it has to be readable by other programmers, and it has to do something useful for people who aren’t. That’s what I love: figuring out some little aspect of other people’s worlds, and making tools that do useful things for them.

And it turns out I like writing, too — I just don’t like literary criticism, which is what high-school English is. I also really like studying history, now that I can focus on the stories and themes, rather than the easily testable rote memorization of names and dates. That’s where a lot of my time has been going lately. I still feel like a complete n00b, but I’m taking it more seriously than I ever did in school.