I’ve always struggled with math my entire life. It’s so bad that if I can’t count it out on my fingers I need a calculator. In school I was in special classes for it along with reading (not quite sure why I was in reading classes when I can read just fine, although sometimes words seem to run together, not like seeing them backwards like dyslexia though) and in those classes I still struggled. The highest math classes I took in school was algebra which I had to pass to graduate.
Anyway it’s something I feel a lot of shame over, even if it’s not my fault my brain is weird, it still does a number on my self-esteem when a child can calculate numbers better than me.
Worth noting I also have depression, GAD and OCD.
Real math (ie proofs) is completely different from computation. Stuff like the quadratic formula is just applying an algorithm to crunch out a number. In essence, it’s about being a human computer, which incidentally was what the word “computer” originally meant: a human calculator.