[khedoros1]

I remember in college that I took some examples of recursive functions, hand-wrote the call stacks, and spent hours and hours pacing in a study room, thinking about it, until the patterns started to feel natural.

I did that kind of thing more than once, just working through algorithms in my head, I guess learning to trust that it'll work, as long as there's a path from the allowed arguments down to the base case. For me, it was never something that reading a few words could clarify.