Don’t get me wrong, mathematical modeling is groovy shit. There is a lot that can be done with broad categories of problems. It’s simple and elegant when you get it right.
I’m going to use an anecdote here. When I was very young I always dreaded PE. I could run fast, and do other physical things well, but I could not catch a ball to save my life. I couldn’t understand how everyone else was plotting the trajectories in real time, and I had about a 5% success rate.
Later I came across sports I was good at like cycling and rock climbing, and one of the things I noticed along the way was there were aspects of the activities that took me out of the state of constantly trying to plan the next move. My mind apparently had the wiring to do the work, even if I wasn’t thinking about how it was done.
Applying this “approach” to catching a ball, brought me up to speed.
The other thing I would like to point out is despite the anger and frustration and fear, blaming others, and making sweeping generalizations will always poison the feedback loop. You talk about being bitter and giving up in the past. That’s throwing up an insurmountable wall to any future progress. It’s basically saying to anyone you want to relate to, “this is your fault before we’ve even started.”
People have to meet in the middle to move forward, and if you carry all of the bitterness forward and dump it in the lap of the next prospective relationship, how do you expect them to respond?
