The Myth of the Math Person: Why I Didn’t Enter Tech Until 2020

I’ve always been a book person.

I was the kid getting scolded for reading under her desk in elementary school, the teen who spent her entire part-time paycheck at Chapters. I loved books, and I was good at them—good at reading them, good at analyzing them, good at writing my own. I used to lug my favourite three or four novels to school with me every day and arrange them on my desk just so I could look at them.

The people around me saw this passion and encouraged me early and often. I could be an English teacher, a librarian, a journalist, an author! I cultivated an obnoxious vocabulary and a snobbishness for grammar. When little me wanted to do a book report on a middle-grade fantasy series about talking owls, I was gently prodded toward Frank Herbert’s Dune instead. So what if it was nearly 200,000 words? I should challenge myself. I was a book person.

Just as important as what I was, though, is what I wasn’t: I was not a math person.

And by “not a math person,” I mean I got so overwhelmed by a single elementary-level fractions lesson that I gave up on ever being good at math. I looked around at my peers, all of whom seemed to be progressing without issue, and felt both confused and embarrassed.

It’s okay, I told myself. I don’t have to be good at math. I’m a book person.

Going forward, I had two options: I could stick to what came easy to me and be smart, or try to do math and be a failure.

***

Some of you may be thinking, um, Katie, there’s a third option. You could work hard at math and develop an understanding. You could grapple with challenging concepts and learn.

But why struggle when I could be comforted by the dichotomy of left brain versus right, analytical versus creative?

I imagined math people read equations the way I read books, extracting meaning from symbols with a passing glance. I thought there were people — mostly boys — for whom math just made sense, whose idle thoughts were populated with long division the way mine were with Simbas and Frodos. It looked like magic to me, and not a variety I could access.

I’d leave the numbers magic to the math people. I had my books.

***

Of course, books weren’t my only love. My nerdery also extended deep into the internet.

I first experimented with code in the context of online communities, from Neopets to bizarrely esoteric MMOs. I painstakingly laid out my pet pages or wove interactive maps for my friends and I to explore. None of it was intuitive, yet there was a joyfulness in throwing absolutely everything at the wall to see what would stick.

When something finally would stick — a problem divided and conquered, numbers coerced into doing my bidding — I would be proud. Excited. Downright euphoric. I’d made something, and it functioned!

But those were just games, girl-coded internet fluff. I had no idea that was what a math person could look like.

***

Years and years later, when it came time to choose a career, I went the predictable route. Anything STEM was off the table. If high-school math stressed me out to the point of dropping classes, what business had I in tech?

I got myself a certificate in creative book publishing and landed the entry-level version of my dream job. I created and edited magazine content by day and wrote fiction by night. I was doing what I was always destined to do. I was making the most of my talents.

And if I was bored, well, nothing for it. I already had my dream job. I was excelling at my singular talent. What else was there?

***

Every six months or so, a quiet voice would rear its head and politely ask why I’d never tried to get into web dev, into video games, into tech in general — you love those spaces, Katie, why have you never pursued them?—and I always gave it the same answer. Tech is for math people. I’m not a math person.

But then I chanced upon a simple phrase. I don’t remember where exactly I heard it (probably a book!), but I remember the way it made me feel. How I had to stop, blink, and just stand still for a few seconds, processing.

There’s no such thing as a math person.

Simple, right? But for me, the myth of the math person had been such a convenient, pervasive lie that I’d never bothered challenging it. It was useful. It assured me it was okay to stay in my lane. It defined my comfort zone.

No such thing as a math person.

So no such thing as not a math person, either.

For the first time, I seriously considered that maybe there wasn’t some innate limitation in my brain that made anything involving numbers — anything I associated with the truly smart people — forever out of reach.

This realization changed the way I saw my future. Maybe if I put in the work to understand this subject I’d always pretended not to care about...

It was like an old skeleton key I’d thrown away years ago had suddenly been dropped into my palm. I saw all those doors that I’d locked shut after that first overwhelming fractions lesson, after the humiliation of disastrously failing an eleventh-grade math test, after every time someone comforted me with the myth that of course I wasn’t good at algebra, and why should I be— I had books!

The quiet voice was getting louder, and it could no longer be silenced with the myth.

So I figured I’d give it a try, dip my toes back into HTML and CSS and, hey, why not an undergrad-level computer science course or two? Worst case scenario, at least I’d know.

And best-case scenario? Where I am now, one week into web development bootcamp and fresh off the high of completing my first project. Feeling intimidated, short on sleep, and indescribably giddy to be mastering something I never thought possible for myself.

So if you’re searching for something new, maybe spend an afternoon peeking back through doorways you’ve already closed.

Related reading:

• Episode 52: How to Solve Math Problems, Unladylike
• Grit, Angela Duckworth