I've Been working on it for 3 years now and It's getting more and more fun every day. In fact, I have rediscovered so many things on my own that I thought never existed. My biggest "Eureka" moment was when I discovered factorization via the difference of squares method on my own by using 2D geometry. I previously did not know that such a method existed nor that GNFS is based on it. Later on I discovered that a composite number is actually a perfect square less a function of a triangular number which lead me to develop a method of factorization that is rather cool but unfortunately still not good enough. I have had literally dozens of these moments where I find a certain relationship between numbers that I later on find out is some sort of rule/conjecture that was made hundreds of years ago by some mathematician!
To some of you these might be really trivial and well known facts that you learned in school. For me however, it is something I take pride in as math was by far my worst subject growing up and I actually dropped out of college because of math. The last math course I took was in high school over 10 years ago.
I have a new found love for mathematics and algebra in general and I would encourage anyone reading this to pick a problem and try working on it just for the fun of it :D