Recursion finally clicked when I stopped trying to trace every call

I used to draw out the whole call stack every single time, which made anything past three levels of depth unreadable and exhausting. What actually worked was trusting the base case and the recursive case separately instead of trying to hold the whole tree in my head at once — assume the smaller call already works, then just write what happens one level up. Sounds obvious written down. Took me embarrassingly long to actually believe it while solving a problem instead of just nodding along to a video.