A grade can become a child’s explanation of themselves long after the assignment is forgotten.

A mark given at nine can become a fact about yourself at forty. The assignment is gone, the subject is forgotten, and the conclusion remains, that you are not a maths person, that you cannot write. A single assessment of one piece of work on one day gets promoted to a permanent description.

If you carry one of these, try to recall what the actual assignment was. Usually you cannot, which is the point. Testing the conclusion now, by attempting the thing as an adult, is often enough to dislodge it.