I have been awful at math my entire life. And not just "I-would-rather-not-do-math-bad" but "I've-had-a-math-tutor-since-fifth-grade-bad". So to all the people who also are terrible at math, I feel you. But I also get all the people who are good at math but are bad at history. Or bad at english. Or chemistry. Or anything else. I understand it. No one can be good at everything.
I'm writing this at the same desk that I sat at doing math homework all through high school and I'm sure a lot of tears hit this desk. But I also sat here while writing a ton of English papers that I got A's on and sat here while studying for history tests that I got perfect scores on.
Some guy named Albert Einstein who was okay at math back in the day once said "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." You may not be able to find the integral of a trig function but you may be able to whip out a hundred supply and demand graphs without thinking twice about it.
School and grades have become so competitive in recent years and everyone has began to put the pressure on themselves to keep up with it all. We can't help but compare ourselves to everyone around us, it's human nature. We look at what the person next to us is accomplishing and we get frustrated when we can't do the same. We beat ourselves up over things we have no control over. It's not my fault I don't understand math. It's not your fault you don't understand microbiology. However, with that being said, it is your fault if you quit trying to understand it. I go to my math class every Tuesday and Thursday hoping that today is the day it all clicks. But, I have accepted that I'm not going to be an engineer or a doctor or anything that requires intensive math and I'm okay with that. I can't do math very well, but I know I am smart in subjects like english and history. Even though math makes about as much sense to me as Chinese, I know I am not dumb because of it. And neither are you.
One subject does not dictate if you are "smart". There is not a magical line you get to cross when you get an A in a class. Not everyone can be an expert in every single topic or subject, it just isn't feasible and I think we forget that. We are obsessed with being perfect that a lot of times we forget that we are good at something. We are all smart in something. Your something may not be math, or english, or physics, but there is something you know you're good at and you really enjoy. And those are the things you should focus on, not whether or not you can tell the difference between an Italian sonnet or a Shakespearean sonnet.
I am not trying to say that school and grades don't matter, because they absolutely do matter. I am just saying that the one class you don't really understand is not end-all be-all.
