Comment by notmyjob
It sounds like you have routed around your spatial visualization deficit, but that just proves the importance of alternate cognitive strategies rather than indicate that such an aptitude or deficit doesn’t ceteris paribus impact mathematical achievement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability
You probably are high g (iq), which has, historically at least, dominated other factors in determining overall outcomes.
I took some sort of IQ test when I was a kid and there was an entire section that was "if you rotate this object around that axis, it matches which of the followin g options". Try as I might, I can't picture this in my head (picturing anything other than a sphere or a cube is tough) but I found that I could look at the options and logically exclude them in a very tedious way by inspection.
It's one of the reasons I like computer graphics so much: the computer does the rotation for you! Stereo graphics (using the funny LCD glasses) was a true revelation to me, and learning how to rotate things using matrics was another.