It's definitely possible you've already done monadic things in code. If it's any consolation, I would not have ever been able to grasp monads by reading tutorials alone and the monad laws are simply too abstract for me to have envision a concrete usage. I learned without touching Haskell at all and it's my opinion is that Scala + Cats is a much easier onramp to monads than Haskell.

You sound like a kind and curious person. If you ever want a one-on-one walkthrough please reach out to me (email in bio). Everyone deserves the chance to understand something if they want to.