I see you as fortunate. I battled for years with frustration and loss of passion for coding until I ran into LISP/Scheme/Racket. I like how you put it that it "locked into my brain like it had always been there", I felt the same when I finally got to it. I also discovered this accidentally but much later in my career and only after I started lurking on HN few years ago. I am learning and toying frequently and am very excited again. To give you an example, I'm on vacation with my family and took with a me a book in logic programming in scheme which introduces the logic programming concepts, solves a few problems using the learned techniques then it goes on to to implement minikanren in less than 300 lines of code. The whole book is a mere 50 pages. The knowledge and understanding blow my mind.