I can talk humanities and social sciences at a graduate level and am comfortable with the physical side of trauma medicine, but STEM subjects are really difficult for me for more or less the same reason. Shitty public/Catholic schooling meant I effectively lost out on a meaningful primary and secondary science and mathematics education. Now I’m a scientific horticulturist because I thought horticulture was a fake science that I could sneak my way into because I’m decent with plants. It isn’t though. Outside of ecology, it’s the ultimate interdisciplinary physical science. I’ve had to learn mathematics through analytical trigonometry and calculus but even basic algebra barely makes sense to me. Chemistry and physics are totally lost on me. I spent those preteen/teenage years building an intuitive knowledge base for the subjects that interest me but I feel the effects of an underfunded public school with any kind of super technical field that I never had childhood exposure to. It fundamentally doesn’t click.