You can absolutely learn math on your own. Many of the most well-known mathematicians, engineers, and scientists were largely self-taught. Examples include da Vinci, Watt, Edison, the Wright Brothers, Heaviside, Ampere, Boole, Galileo, Pascal, Leibniz, and Ramanujan. The learning materials available to those guys were vastly inferior to what we have today. In fact, you could take yourself very far using nothing more than Wikipedia coupled with a divide-and-conquer approach. If you want to understand a topic, do a Wikipedia search on it. There are usually some good references and links at the bottom of the page that can help with further background and intuition. Never be intimidated by the complexity. Every complex topic can be broken down into simple, easy-to-understand pieces. For every subtopic in the description that you don't understand, click on its link, read, and repeat. Eventually, your subtopic dive should reach a low enough level that you can grasp the concept and use it to understand the previous higher-level topic. For each concept, you should develop an intuitive understanding that goes along with the formalism. Try to visualize every concept in some way. Use mental animations, graphs, sounds, colors, etc. One of the tricks is that you should only focus on learning a small number of new concepts every day (maybe 5 to 7 at most). A night's sleep will help you consolidate those concepts and build on them. For even the most accomplished mathematicians, there are papers that they don't understand at first glance. They must go through their own divide-and-conquer process to grasp unfamiliar concepts.