When I was in high school failing calculus for whatever reason - bad teacher, or Im too slow, whatever - but refusing to accept I could not grasp the subject I stumbled upon Keisler's work on Infinitesimal Calculus. While I did not fully grasp the intricacies of the transfer principle, working with the axioms was easy enough and I was able to learn calculus at a level such that I would find Analysis easier going than most later on. I also learned about hyperreals, the concept of nonstandard extensions, that the reals are a crazy concept before leaving highschool. Some things are so rich you can't help but expand your horizons.

I think the brain must do some sort of cross training - learn python and improve your C++, so that when I came back to limits they seemed intuitive and not as difficult as I remembered.