Why I stopped trying to 'understand' black holes and started trying to picture them instead

I spent years trying to intellectually understand black holes through equations I didn't have the background to actually follow, and mostly came away more confused. What finally helped wasn't better math — it was building a slower, physical picture in my head, one piece at a time, and accepting the picture would never be complete.

The piece that actually changed things for me: picturing spacetime itself as the thing that's warped, not space as an empty stage with warped rules layered on top of it. Once I stopped picturing a black hole as a hole in something and started picturing it as a place where the geometry itself stops behaving the way it does everywhere else, several things that used to feel contradictory stopped feeling that way.

I still can't do the math. But the picture in my head now doesn't collapse the moment someone asks a follow-up question, and that was the actual goal all along — not expertise, just a mental model sturdy enough to hold real curiosity.

Part of the deeper dive: The Curious Person's Guide to Space, the Night Sky, and What's Actually Out There.