Ask HN: Is it possible to develop a mathematical intuition later in life?

Hello, HN. I'm a 26 year old guy, and lately I've been feeling like my full stack job is a bit of a dead end. I'm really excited by the current generation of ML stuff, however, and so I'm attempting somewhat of a pivot into this space to try to get back my motivation.

But I'm running into a problem almost immediately, which is that it's taking way too much effort for me to understand the math behind things. I never took Linear or MV or pretty much any hardcore math classes in college. I did well in Calc 2 but otherwise just took mostly stats courses to fulfill my requirements for the BS CS. So now I'm being exposed to all these new concepts like matrix transpositions and partial derivatives and I get the basic gist of things, but I really don't have the kind of intuition required to read those formulas like I can read code. And it's kind of making me doubt my ability to pivot to ML at all.

My question is, can one acquire this sort of mathematical intuition later in life? How can one do so? Is it even worth it? (should I give up on my ML dreams and just go be a lawyer?) Thanks!