Mathematics is taught very rigidly. When I'm independently working and studying math, it feels like art - like I'm making something and it tickles the creative side of my brain. In class it feels like the structured STEM course I initially signed up for.
It's a world of rules and structures people have carefully built over the millennium and you can add to it (if you can) or just walk around and observe and learn.
Analogously, learning mathematics, especially higher mathematics and even more so Algebra and Category Theory also feels like learning a new language. Working with it feels like writing poetry. Mathematics literature has a lot of the characteristic features of literature. There are many rules, but if you can break them, you are a mad genius!
I was talking to a professor and he told me about realising that he could read mathematics, granted it's not the same as picking up a story book, but there is this entire new world out there when you start reading mathematics. He also pulled up the linguistics definition of a language and said that perhaps mathematics is the only language with no exceptions in class once.