Without fail, I failed each homework assignment, prompting my teacher to set up a meeting with my parents. Ever the emotional one, my mother cried on the drive home while my father yelled at me for not “understanding something simple” or “asking for help”. I wanted to curl into a ball on the floorboard and die, I wanted to open the car door on the interstate and take my seatbelt off. Not understanding math always felt like my personal fault. The anxiety dug its claws deeper into my seven-year-old skin, whispering tales of my idiocy, cementing the idea that I wouldn't ever understand math and that I would never be able to ask for help like my father demanded of me. For the rest of my life, all the way up to present day, math continued to haunt me. Stalking me through the bushes of my life, waiting to pounce and vomit that same feeling of hopeless despair that I felt in second grade all over my face. I continued to pass every math class I took by the skin of my teeth, suffering every moment along the way in detentions and study halls where instructors didn’t have the time to re-teach a sixteen-year-old basic math. By mid-high