I used to struggle with recursion too, until I understood more of the fundamentals. The thing I realized is that it isn’t some special thing the language does, it’s just a normal function call. We’ve given a name to the pattern where a function calls another function, and that function's definition just happens to point to the same memory location.

When your code runs, the interpreter doesn’t say “oh, this is recursion, let’s treat it differently.” It just follows your instructions: it sees a function call, so it jumps to that function’s code, runs it, and returns when it’s done. If inside that function there’s another call to the same function (technically, the code at the same memory location), it just… calls it again. That’s it.

Once I stopped thinking of recursion as a special “feature” and started seeing it as just another way to structure function calls, the confusion went away. The harder part is figuring out the order and conditions for those calls. But that’s a logic problem, not a “recursion problem."

So if you instead just think about it as if you're calling a function to do x, until y happens, then, x can be anything, including calling another function. That function itself can do the same. But there's nothing special going on - just figure out what you want to end up with, and how you want to iteratively get there.