Mathematics and My Self Esteem

“What would you change if you could go back in time?” my friend Living asked during a writer’s meeting. We were gathered around my dining table on a Sunday morning, each of us sipping sugary coffee while prudently eyeing the chocolate chip cookies I had proffered.

It would be nice to blithely say “I would change nothing. I regret nothing. My mistakes make me a better person.” Yet, as I contemplated the chronology of my life and sunk my teeth into sugar and chocolate, I realized it wasn’t so.

How often have we heard people - with the air of a mountain-top sage – say they regret nothing? That they are the wonderful people they are today because of their mistakes and bad decisions.  That they are strong and wise because of the consequences of every choice they made. I beg your pardon?  Have they truly thought it through? Or is it merely an utterance of self-preservation?

Is it possible that perhaps they could be better? Has the alternative of a bad decision been considered with the wisdom of hindsight? Or are we callous with the past, that we kick our history and gloss it over with the veneer of denial and arrogance? While we cannot change the past, we can and certainly must learn from decisions made of a younger self. The utility of memory and experience is not just for midnight chit chat. They are lessons and tools that when properly traversed, help us make better choices in the future. We wise up. After all, isn’t that why we have memory?

“Yes,” I replied to Living, as I made the bad decision of reaching for another chocolate chip cookie. There are certainly things in my life I would change.

I could trace it to the exact moment I felt that way.

It Began When I Was A Student

I went to a primary school at the fringe of Taiping town where days were equal parts charming and dull. My sister and me would look forward to evenings where we would cycle around the neighbourhood and play with the kids at the tennis court. It was always the boys versus girls and we played games like “Malerm” and “Jengket” that were as thrilling as any kampong football match. Shouts, laughs and promises to meet the next day were followed by dinner and a happy outing with a tv sitcom.

Back home, I read voraciously and spent hours with my nose in a book. Momma was a teacher and brought home storybooks from her school library. The incessant reading in the dark and the dinner table brought on glasses by my eighth birthday. Shortsighted as I was, my imagination certainly was not. I spent my leisure writing pages and pages of stories in my exercise books. When Dad dropped me off at my grandmother’s house after school, I told stories out loud to fill the dull hours there. The narration continued in the car when dad arrived to pick us up. My parents got used to me walking around the house telling a story I created in my head.  Later on, when my youngest sister turned 6, she insisted on me telling her stories at bedtime. Even as I grumbled, the story I summoned from my imagination went on night after night at my sister’s bed, starring a little boy named Aietiegel and his dog Ping Wok Ping.

The romance of my childhood and its fairytale came to a gradual halt when I went to an all-girl secondary school in town. It was a school where straight As made you popular, not your teen-fatale with the opposite sex or the deep pockets of your parents. It mattered less if you were nerdy, plain or socially awkward. If you scored top percenta, due respect was accorded; and generously. You were at the top of the pecking order. In a world bobbing on superficiality, that sounded refreshingly cool didn’t it?  

Except that whatever the metric, there were always winners and losers.

My whimsical childhood was replaced by the introduction to real life. The hard reality of competition began taking away the fun of my otherwise charming existence. I felt like a circle squished into a hard box, bumped and bruised in the confines of class and a garish blue pinafore. I’m afraid I came closer to the side of losers.

I was very much an average student who spent too much time in my head. My favourite subjects were English and Bahasa, unlike the majority in my class who cited Math or Science.  I was dreamy, sensitive and showed signs of being a mild social justice warrior. At 14, I read a teenage romance novel and became hooked on feminism. It became a little bit of my brand. I was emotional and had plenty of theories about human behavior, often easily upset by people I deemed insensitive.

But the realm of loserhood for me came in the form of Mathematics. For some reason, I couldn’t get Math. I just couldn’t. It also seemed that I was the only Chinese girl in my class unable to get it. I don’t say this to bring up stereotypes, but the lack of aptitude was a real and conscious thing, and it does things to your self-esteem. When you are below the median of your peers, you begin to question, “Am I not smart?”

I struggled with daily Math in class and consistently got dismal results. “You have to be good in Math, you’re Chinese,” a good friend in her naivete said to me, no malice intended. Yet I couldn’t. While everyone seemed to sail through Math, I had no aptitude whatsoever for function, logarithm and progression. The triangles and degrees of slants we had to calculate baffled, addled and depressed my brain.  I was not only bad among the Chinese girls, I was as bad as the worst student in the form when it came to Math. To put it bluntly I was unusually weak in math.

It’s not that I didn’t try. I did. I stared at the Math problems at home willing myself to see the possibilities but it never came. Nobody could explain it to me without me finally pretending to get it, lest I irritate people.  It’s like asking a person with two left feet to dance gracefully. It’s like asking a person with no imagination to write a story from scratch. The difference is that I was in an environment that prized math capability.

My Mistake was Math

My biggest mistake was taking up the Science stream in Fourth Form, meaning I was introduced to the Voldemort-horror called Additional Mathematics. I took the Science Stream out of pressure and nothing else. In Malaysia, you’re expected to take the Science Stream if the image of a good student is what you want. Forgive my 16-year-old self for being short-sighted. I hadn’t yet discovered Jordan Peterson and Matthew Hussey. I hadn’t yet discovered the left and right brain, the personality types or the inaccuracy of the blank slate theory.

This terrible decision was my undoing. Oh let’s not sugarcoat it. When we had our first Add Math exam, I was the only student to fail. A score sheet was passed around and the red failed score blinked loudly next to my name. Everyone else had blue scores next to them. Why couldn’t the teacher be a little more sensitive? It was humiliating and I was reminded that I was failing at something that everyone else didn’t have a big problem with.  

Math and Physics tuition became very stressful because I just couldn’t figure it out. I just couldn’t see the possibility in a sum. I ended up copying from my friend next to me. In my misery, I asked Momma if I could stop going for tuition. She said no. Her logic was that if I stopped, I would do worse. But it wasn’t helping me. It was just reinforcing that I was horrendous at Math and the aftermath of class often brought on feelings that were closer to dark than bright. Mothers do not always know best.

Not once did I tell a story or write a novel during my secondary days. My writing and storytelling didn’t matter in the face of the more important Math. I didn’t realise back then that I was a good public speaker. It never came up in classes and perhaps we didn’t have enough curricula activities that covered the arts. Or maybe I was just too shrouded in my teenage depression. I didn’t have the opportunity to shine and be a little above average in something.  All that was not important because I was bad in Math. I believed that, and it seemed – maybe my projection - everybody believed it too.

After all, Math and Science were the coveted subjects. Being good in English? Bahasa? I never took pride when I scored well in those subjects (although to be fair, the English paper was ridiculously easy) because I felt it never mattered. I dismissed my aptitude for language and speech as “it’s not important at all to be good in them, they are the lesser skills compared to Math.” I completely sidelined my creativity in my younger days in the face of being terrible at Math. My creative gene just sat dormant while the inferior Math gene went to work. Boy, was I miserable.

On the morning of the national examination (SPM) for Additional Mathematics, I remember sitting morose by the breakfast table. I knew I was going to fail the exam and there was nothing I could do. My parents were chatting and I ate my breakfast wordlessly.  Strange how sadness makes you more introspective. The feeling of walking into an exam hall and knowing catastrophe was about to occur was heavy on me. I can’t remember what I did in the exam hall. I do recall writing a long message in the exam paper asking for sympathy and mercy. I didn’t get it because I got a giant FAIL when the results came out. Long into my adulthood, I would sometimes wake up in utter fright from a nightmare. The nightmare of going for the SPM examination. Freud would say I have unresolved issues surrounding that examination. He would be right.

I felt school feeling completely un-smart.

Know Thyself.

My secondary school days redefined how I felt about myself.

Not once in my secondary days did I think of the strengths I had. I reduced myself to an inferior shell because of Math. Nevermind that I had a vivid imagination or possessed oratory skills. Nevermind that even back then, had an instinct for knowing and doing things that were interesting. I had leadership skills too, but so crippled was I by Math, I found myself submissive when given a club position. I was forgettable. My bubbly spirit had taken a holiday.

“I’m not a smart person,” I would say in conversations. I carried this feeling for a long time.

And then one day many years later, while sitting on a plane as an adult, I casually opened Helen Fisher’s “Why Him, Why Her?” a psychology book explaining the four personality types. I was immersed all through my long haul flight and when I came up for air, my head was spinning. Suddenly I understood why my friend Mikey could never read between the lines and why Cindy always needed structure to be comfortable. I began to understand why I was so highly attuned to people around me and why people always called me sensitive. That book was pivotal. I began reading more books and discovered I couldn’t blame myself for being bad in Math. By the time I reached the books of Steven Pinker and Sam Harris, I understood humans on a level that gave me relief.

We are born with a genetic code that while is to a degree malleable, for the most part is not. Apologies my friends. Try training a guy with no ball sense to be a footballer. He may end up at best so-so, but he will never beat the one who is naturally gifted, even with triple the training. Are Bill Gates and Einstein merely results of hard work, practice and having the sheer luck of being born in countries that support their endeavours? Their brain scans will tell a different story.

Very few of us can be the sprinter Usain Bolt or mathematician Alan Turing. You need the wiring. The genetics. Somehow in the course of the zygote Lin Dee being formed, the grand Universe decided to leave out the Math gene in her. Being matter-of-fact and logical is never second nature to me. I take longer to understand an article with data and graphs unlike my structured friend Jin who draws profound conclusions upon reading. I marvel at my colleague Cindy who writes with brevity and clarity, her direct firefighting emails to difficult clients. While me? I always wrote and meandered, my emails almost story-like. Mathematics is logic. The fact that I lack math meant I lack logical and critical thinking abilities. I have to think harder to get logic. It’s harder for me deduce and see patterns.

What I didn’t realise back then was that while I was born with a lacking Math gene, resulting in my struggle with logic and structure;

I was given a wildly creative gene in return.

I Thrived At Work

The adjective “creative” is often used to describe me by friends, clients and acquaintances. I always see things via sense and feel. I am literally, highly sensitive.

When it comes to ideas and writing stories, I am bubbling with them. Perhaps what I consider my real superpowers are my intuition and perception. I read people like I read books. My sensitivity to the human condition won me many friends. My ability to say the right thing and engage people made me likeable to all, old and young. I innately know how to make something interesting, how to stand out.  A friend once said to me, “Everyone likes looking at your Facebook posts.”

For awhile I puzzled at friends who lacked ideas and creativity. I puzzled at those who were unable to read people. I assumed these were things everyone had. Little did I realise, they were just as much “gifts” as Math was.

After graduation, I became a writer with a newspaper and therein marked the beginning of a happy chapter. Many people lament schooling days as their best days but my working days are and continue to be my best. I enjoyed my work profusely. Because I had skills in the areas required, I found myself joyous and energetic. It was a complete juxtaposition of my schooling days. I hardly had time to feel inadequate in the working world. If anything, I was becoming more Lin Dee. I got more ideas and branched out to starting a side hustle. People reverberated to me. I attracted the right clients. First impressions were successful. Many friendships. Best of all.  No one asked me how to solve logarithm or progression. 

Yet, even among my modest success, I remained convinced I wasn’t a smart person. “If people really knew me, they would know I’m not smart,” I repeatedly thought to myself. And I assumed that everyone who was decent in Math was smarter than me.

When I was 26, I interviewed an entrepreneur who ran a science-based business. We ended up having a great conversation that ran on for hours. When he discovered our mutual interest in fengshui, he was keen to hear my thoughts. Intimidated, I blurted “I’m not a smart girl. There is nothing I know that you don’t.”

He replied, “I’ve spent all these time talking to you, I can tell you’re a smart girl.”

I was shocked but of course I didn’t believe him. He was just being nice.

By my thirties, my side hustle was up and running and doing pretty well. I did PR for a variety of clients and went round town setting up links with various medias. It was a lot of fun. I was entertaining the thought of leaving my dayjob too.

And then I landed a new client. He was an engineer and a product developer. Naturally the old part of me was instantly convinced he was smart because of his proclivity to Math. I started doing his PR and we began seeing more of each other. I admit to being impressed by him. He was knowledgeable about world affairs, he handled customer complaints with the Zen of a Buddha, he had critical thinking skills that gave him sanguine and a way of thinking I found almost Yoda-like. On top of that, he articulated himself with logic and confidence. I couldn’t help finding him extremely intelligent.

This person whom I found intelligent began treating me like his equal. I’m used to clients asking for my opinions in my line of work. But these discussions are often conducted in a bigger brainstorming group and mostly, clients have made up their minds when I come in. Them asking was often lip service to a degree.

Not Mr Mathematical Engineer though. He wanted to know what I thought all the time. I became almost like his right-hand person, helping with decisions. Because I held him in such esteem, I struggled when he first asked for my opinion. My lack of confidence caused me to ignore my gut and instead reply with googled research and random studies. Yet consistently, each time before his company put out a public message, my phone would tring with his text, “What do you think?” He wouldn’t proceed without my answer and when my feedback came, he changed things to accommodate my opinion. For the first time since I left school, I actually asked myself “Is it possible that maybe I’m not un-smart?”

Eventually I began to develop confidence and answer him more honestly.

At the end of our PR campaign, he wanted to sign another campaign with me. “I can see you base your decisions on logic,” I said,” “I base mine on the sense I get.”

He nodded, completely in agreement, my lack of mathematical logic unassailing him, validating me at that moment.

It was right then that I stopped feeling un-smart.

Should we look back on bad decision?

Since then, I look at myself more positively. I’ve discovered more of my strengths and worked to hone them. The other day I read a book titled “Life 3.0” by the physicist Max Tegmark. He explained what he described as very simple Math in one chapter and I found myself gripped with an old inadequacy. Of course I couldn’t get it. It took a minute, but I got over it. I turned the pages and proceeded to enjoy the hopes, dreams and more philosophical parts of the book dedicated to his AI message. I enjoyed all that with my sugary coffee.

This story is not complete if I don’t pay tribute to the little girl who told stories and wrote in her exercise books. Not long after feeling better about myself, my writing came back to me. One day I decided to write again. The words just came and I was late for dance class when I looked up to pause. That was my first experience of “flow” where time stops and you work at a magical optimum. I wrote for fun initially but after awhile, began seriously working on my craft. Today, I have my first fiction out – Superficiality, a book I am most happy with. It is available in most chained bookstores in Malaysia. With a little bit of creativity, I even got my book to be used as reading material for a school. 

Later on when I ran my school program SchoolHeroes, I discovered that my speaking abilities were tremendously helpful. The room was often quiet when I spoke. Clients bought my pitch and I attracted various interesting people to join my quest. Most of the activities and lesson plans I created for SchoolHeroes were a hit with the students. I went on to the film industry after that, and today I’m working on my first screenplay. I cannot believe that at the end of the day, I am doing something I did as a child in my grandmother’s house and on my younger sister’s bed. Telling stories.

This creative gene never got a curtain call in school, but it buoyed me beautifully into the future, giving me the opportunity to shine and feel special.

What Do We Do With The Past?

Because things turned out fine, does that mean I do not look back?

Not at all.  The past is the many lessons we grow from. Some may say the struggle was good for making me stronger and keeping me humble. I agree and disagree. Certainly. there are good and bad in every situation but the ratio of it? Could I have learned about my Math disability in other ways and endured less pain? Definitely. Life is such that a lesson repeats itself until learned. There are opportunities to learn without so bitter a pill.

You can suffer being with the same lousy partner for 1 year, or you can choose to suffer for 10 years. Both give you the same lesson anyway. So choose your medicine.

The opposite reflection is important if you’re honest about dissecting your life. So to answer my friend Living if I would go back and change anything about my life, it is this. I would not take the Science Stream. I would not take Additional Mathematics.

Had I done the above, I would be 100% more confident! My school days would have been so much happier. I may have actually given more time to my writing and storytelling. I may have expedited my writing career. I would have more friends instead of looking depressed all the time in school.

While it’s good to have humility, there is detriment to feeling lesser too. Being brutally honest lets you take stock of your life more accurately. Looking back like this enables you to make significantly smarter and better decisions moving forward.

Today, I don’t beat myself up for not understanding the details of cryptocurrency or a government bank moratorium. I have friends who can kindergarten explain it to me. I appreciate my creativity more.

Yet many people remain careless with their lives, laughing too easily about past mistakes, repeating them, never owning up and treating past experiences as battle scars to prop up a former glorious self. In some cases, these experiences are proof of them living a “colourful” life. Ah. They can fool some. They lament their sad memories like a hero’s tale, bringing listeners down with the weight of its’ misery, solidifying the self-pity they have come to identify with

I believe people are not completely honest, when they say nothing of a bitter past requires change, even if these changes are merely reflection.

Because what is memory for?

Memory is not for the stories you tell unwilling listeners on drunken nights. Nor is memory reason for you to shed more tears. Memory’s main utility is not for sad one-sided conversation. Simply, memory is there for survival. Memory is there – akin to a weapon, to make us better in handling our present and future. Use it.

Respect your memories by learning from them. Love yourself enough that you won’t put yourself through that pain again. Then, and only then, will you make better and more meaningful memories for yourself.

Sayonara Math! There is no love lost.

I couldn’t do Math. But I did write a book :)