Mathematics isn't a skill, that's something I'll argue with others to the grave. It's a matter of perspective. Sure, some people are born already looking at everything through that perspective and become "child prodigies" -- but that's all it is. A way of looking at things.

I adore math. I love reading about it, studying it, watching videos and films about it, and talking about it. Ask my friends, they would more than surely tell you I'm obsessed in their opinion.

But this wasn't the case freshman year of high school. I hated the subject. I passed Algebra I with 61. I'm pretty sure to this day it was because my teachers doing. Anyhow, I wasn't gifted. Although, my teacher did know one thing about me. I wanted to be a physicist more than anything in the world, which is more true than ever to this day.

The end of freshman year she told me something which I had hilariously not known. Physics was all mathematics. I didn't know this, I only read layman books and watched people describe it's conceptual wonders; the fact that it had any math embedded in it completely flew over my head. The day she told me this, which had sadly been the final day of freshman year, I realized I needed to change. I didn't care anymore how hard it would be, *I decided I must absolutely change.***

I looked at mathematics in a new way. Not as work that had to be done, but as a method for describing the universe. I got better at mathematics. I got a lot better. I'm a rising senior in high school going into AP Calculus BC now. I tutor other kids who struggled in mathematics. I have excellent grades in all the math classes I've had since then as well.

**TLDR; **It's not that people lack skills. People are looking at in incorrectly. People treat it as a poison because that's how they're subjected to it. If people aren't taught applications of mathematics outside finding the volume of a porch, finding how many different combinations of the letters in REFLEX you can create, etc. -- they'll always see it as a boring subject. Most will never excel because they frankly lack the motivation.