I legit teared up over understanding some code I've been intimidated by for the past month.

That's awesome.

My boss slapped some code she found online in a script that evaluates xml, in an attempt to simplify what was already there. Unfortunately, made the output worse. I kept avoiding that section of code for the sake of time. (we had a major release to go live on Sunday) I finally took on that section of code yesterday afternoon and in came the clarity.