Facing the Fear of Looking “Slow”

I started playing Sudoku, and it felt like walking straight into a room I’d avoided my whole life. I never liked puzzles. Word searches made me twitchy. Jigsaws bored me and then irritated me. I had zero patience for any of it.

But I kept seeing people on TikTok talk about Sudoku as this calm little portal into a flow state. Good for the brain, good for nerves, good for breaking the doom-scroll cycle. I wanted that. I wanted my phone to feel like less of a trap.

I’ve never seen myself as the smart one. Growing up, my friends floated through classes with easy A’s. I was buried under flashcards. My mom got into med school with grit, not ease, and I guess I took after her. My brother and dad was the type who read something once and it stuck. I was the type who needed the exact right explanation before anything truly clicked.

So I built this story about myself, that I wasn’t “smart”, but I could work. If I cared enough, I’d get there. And honestly, that mindset carried me further than any kind of natural talent ever could. Building a steady life doesn’t require genius. It just requires showing up.

I’m surprised to see that many of these “smart” people are unable to build a life for themselves outside of academia.

Still, logic games scared me. Numbers scared me. Sudoku looked impossible, like some secret language everyone else got. But I wanted to rewrite that story. So I opened sudoku.coach and started learning the basics. It was slow. I crawled through the easy boards. But something changed within me. I hit that steady hum people talk about. The flow state. One discovery leads to another until the whole thing spills open.

Finding that one number that unlocks half the grid feels better than I expected. It’s like my brain finally stops arguing with itself.

This journey teaches me something different. I’m not here to prove I’m naturally gifted. I’m here to let life surprise me. I’m here to try new things. I’m here to learn, even if it takes time. That feels like real growth to me, and it’s something I’m proud of. When I talk about it, people around me start trying new things too.

Sudoku taught me it’s all logic chains. If a number sits here, it can’t sit there, so it must go somewhere else. It looks like math, but it’s really pattern recognition. Some puzzles still take me more than an hour. Sometimes I switch to the easy ones to fall into that flow faster.

Either way, I’m enjoying the ride. This little grid is teaching me to question the limits I set for myself. It’s helping me write a new story about what I can learn, what I can handle, and who I get to be.