Don’t Know Much About Algebra

I am incapable of holding a sequence of numbers longer than four in my head.

I wish I was being hyperbolic, but I am not. When I worked at The History Channel, each episode of any given show was assigned a “Program ID.” The ID was a random jumble of five numbers (i.e., 29483). Because show titles and episode titles changed frequently (like the time we agonized over whether to name an episode “Casanova Gator” or “Swampin’ Around”), the Program ID was the holy grail by which all episodes were referred to. As a Programming Coordinator, one of my roles was to be the keeper of these sacred IDs. Someone on the social media team, for instance, would give me a call and ask me to quickly tell her the Program ID for “Casanova Gator” (yeah, that is the title we ended up running with). I’d look the ID up in my system and recite it to her. But, somewhere between the time that my eyes grazed over the ID and the moment I produced the number verbally, something would almost inevitably go awry. I’d leave out a digit, invent one, or, most typically, scramble a couple up. This would lead to mayhem, chaos, confusion, all of it often complicating or even temporarily upending the life-saving work of creating reality television. 

It wasn’t just the workplace where this… idiosyncrasy of mine caused problems. Walking up to a vacation rental, my boyfriend, arms heavy with our suitcases, would ask me to punch in the Airbnb door code. I would ask him what the code was, and he would patiently repeat it for me from memory. By the time my finger was poised over the punchpad, I would, like clockwork, have already forgotten the number.

Perhaps most troublingly, several months ago I was at CVS buying supplements (iron, magnesium, and Lay’s Ranch Dip; yes, that is a supplement; if I don’t have it, I feel unwell). When it came time to pay, I forgot my debit card pin, a pin I have had since I was eighteen. It erased itself from my memory like chalk from a sidewalk after a downpour. I paid with my credit card, then went home and tried desperately to remember my pin, but for the life of me, I could not conjure it. I had to call my bank the following day to get the number changed. To this day, I could not tell you what it was. 

For many, these instances would be cause for alarm. Am I having a stroke? How on earth could I just forget a number? The truth is, I have always been abysmal when it came to numbers, in every sense. In elementary school, I was consistently at the bottom of the class in math, saved only from the lowest ranked spot by my twin sister. My sixth grade teacher suggested a math tutor for me. I distinctly remember sitting with my tutor in a humid classroom after an hour of working on exponents together. I recall him putting his head in his hands and whimpering, “Please, just get it, Celeste. Why won't you get it?”

I did not, unfortunately, end up getting it. My freshman year of high school, I scraped by with a C in algebra I. It’s worth noting that I really cared about my grades. A lot. This C was by no means “okay” with me, nor was it a result of slacking. I was an A student in all other subjects, a goody-two-shoes, a hand-raiser, a flute player, an eager little writer for the school newspaper. I was simply terrible, deeply awful at math.

My sophomore year of high school, my parents moved my twin and me from sleepy and underfunded Western Massachusetts to an extremely wealthy suburb of Boston, where our peers had been attending Russian Math School since they were in pull-ups. I was placed in a geometry class, where I promptly sank like a bowling ball in a bath tub. My teacher, sensing my desperation, funneled all her patience and guidance and resources into me. By the end of the year, I had begun to gain a new appreciation for numbers, for the ancient practice of using equations to… just fucking kidding! I passed the class, but hated math more than ever.

My junior year, my guidance counselor placed me in a math class for special needs students called “Intro to Personal Finance.” The funny thing is that this particular class helped me more in the “real world” than any other class I took in high school at all, math or not. While my trigonometry-happy peers were sin-cos-tanning it up, us personal finance burnouts were balancing check-books and learning about W-2s. Indeed, the more I learned how numbers applied to the real world, the more I began to understand their importance, how they were there to help me, not hurt me…. I’M JOKING!! Practical or not, I hated math so much as a junior that I would sit in the back of the class and tear pieces of skin off my lips as I tried and failed to comprehend what a polynomial was. The only “order of operations” I ever truly understood was ripping up my intercept worksheet before bursting into tears. PEMDAS! 

However bad I was, and am, at math, my twin sister Aurora was, and is, worse. She is unable to count things without literally counting them individually on her fingers. In other words, she cannot figure out that she has twenty books in front of her by counting them off by twos. She has to count them one… by one… by one. Her struggles with math were a running joke in our family for a long time. (Yes, readers, that is the main perk of being a twin. My abysmal math capabilities flew somehow under the radar as long as she was around.) She never made it past Algebra I in high school. When she went to college, she failed the placement test, the test that just… tells you what class is appropriate for you. She failed it.

After I forgot my debit card pin, I was a bit rattled. Where did this fundamental lack of numerical understanding come from? Lots of people are bad at math, but how many people cannot hold their own pin number in their head? I don’t have ADD, or any learning disabilities that I know of. And the amnesia I had when it came to numbers was not a memory issue. I actually have an exceptionally good memory when it comes to things like dog breed names and lyrics to Eminem songs. This was something else; this inability to understand numbers in even their most basic form was something bigger. 

I decided, like a good little Gen Z Lady, to self-diagnose. And I was surprised to learn about a phenomenon called “dyscalculia,” which is characterized by difficulty learning or comprehending arithmetic, trouble understanding numbers, figuring out how to manipulate numbers, or perform calculations. Most adults with dyscalculia have a hard time processing math at a fourth-grade level. Ding ding ding! I was jazzed to learn about dyscalculia, but the buzz wore off after a couple days. Dyscalculia felt like a cop-out. I spend so much time thinking about nature-vs-nurture until my head spins, and I don’t feel satisfied brushing this lifelong journey aside by simply self-pathologizing from a Wikipedia article. Couldn’t it be both nature and nurture? It’s likely I have dyscalculia now, but was I born with it? Can you even be born with such a thing?

In the end, I’m not entirely sure what my unusual aversion to simple math means. If my life depended on doing eighth grade level math, I think I’d probably die. I am certain Aurora would die (RIP). Ultimately, I think this, like most other things, is my parents’ fault. They are both superbly gifted with words, and have no interest at all in numbers. As a kid, if I had a question about math, they would do their best to help. But, by the time fractions became involved, they respectfully bowed out. And, while my parents were avoiding math at all costs, they were reading to my sister and me. When we were still in diapers, my mother was doing her dissertation on the Brontë sisters. As a result, our bedtime stories were Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights. By the time we arrived at pre-school, our teacher did not know what to do with us because we were, at age four, reading the Harry Potter books to ourselves with no outside help at all. Our advanced reading levels were not because we were geniuses. The simple fact is that we were taught to value reading above most other things, including and especially math. 

But that can’t be the whole story. As much as I’d love to blame my parents for all my woes, my older siblings are perfectly adequate at math. My brother, in fact, seems to like thinking about personal finance, God help him. He’ll occasionally give me advice about credit scores and Roth IRAs, advice that makes me want to curl up in bed and sleep forever. Maybe there is no bigger answer. Maybe my twin and me are just terrible at math. 

At the end of the day, I was such an irritating little teacher’s pet in history and english that I think a little dose of being bad at something was quite good for me. I am a very competitive person, often to a detriment. If I lost a game of four-square in elementary school, I would hide behind a tree and cry. As an adult, I picked up pole dancing as a hobby. I am not a naturally talented dancer, athlete, gymnast, rock climber, all skills that would make one excel naturally at pole. Despite that, I decided, early on, that I was not going to develop a deep loathing of every girl I perceived to be better than me, like I’ve done in the past with other “supposed-to-be-fun” activities. To this day, I have stuck to that. I’ve been all the happier for it. And, with a heavy heart, I’ll admit that I might possibly have math to thank for that.