> keep working and at some point it'll just click for you

Haha, monads still haven't clicked for me despite knowing F# and Clojure pretty well. I think of them as "functors that you can flatten" (and functors are "things you can `map` over", and `map` is "a structure-preserving transformation"). I know monads syntactically, but not intuitively. Despite this I still manage to work with monads pretty well - sometimes rote knowledge is enough. Maybe if my work involved discovering new monads I'd feel like I'd know them better. (I just see the same option/list/result(ish)/generator-style monads over and over.)