Are there Stupid Questions?

Surprisingly this happens to me every single day. All my life I have had anxiety. I do not normally ask questions because I get distracted a lot more than I should. It is not my fault, my brain will be so focused that something will just pop into my head and I feel I am just going down a rabbit hole. The next thing I know the lunch bell is ringing and I have no idea what the teacher was talking about for the last 5 minutes of the lesson. This happens to me at church a lot as well. It is not like I am uninterested in what the preacher is saying, it is just that my brain gets distracted very easily and often.

Today was just another day in Pre-Calculus, I am trying to get everything done and I was paying attention to the lesson very closely, or so I thought. I notice something on the board that did not make much sense to me (even though I have been listening attentively this whole time). I wanted to ask a question but I did not want to sound stupid. I was not sure if she already said how it happened or if she made a mistake. The thing that is special about me is how my brain operates. How my brain works is I can not just look at something that I do not understand and just say “that is how it works so I am just going to go with it from now on.” I get this from my Dad, when I do not know how something works I need to look it up and understand how it works for me to remember it. Then again, I did not want to sound like an idiot that was not paying attention to the lesson and hold everyone back from learning. As she started teaching more and more I was very worried about whether to ask the question or not. I was letting my own anxiety get the best of me. It is the end of the semester and I can not get behind in any work. I have struggled all throughout school since the first time I took my first test. I have never been a school person but I have managed to get by, by the skin of my teeth you could say. At this point, I needed to ask the question I had been contemplating this whole time, so I did just that.

She started explaining to me how the question worked, at first I still did not understand how it worked. I felt guilty and embarrassed. Here I am trying to understand a simple question but I am holding everyone back in the class. All of a sudden it clicked, I started to understand how it worked but not fully to the point I would know how to go about it on my own. After asking I still felt embarrassed about asking and holding everybody back. Do I regret asking? No, yes I was embarrassed but now I understand a little more than I did at the start.

I say there are stupid questions. Everyone has had a moment where they were like wow that is a dumb question. I work at Under Armour and somebody came in asking if we sold any PUMA gear. We are an Under Armour Factory House, we only sell Under Armour. Why would we sell anything else? Then there are some people that do not pay attention at all and then ask a question that was answered moments before. That is what I was afraid of happening to me, I do not want to be that person that asks the dumb question because I know how annoying that is to me. I guess I am too hard on myself and other people. At the end of the day, I do believe there are stupid questions that can easily be avoided if you just pay attention to whatever you are doing. I do not want to be the person at the short end of the stick, I have always been the type to be embarrassed easily and worry more than I should have.

“Stupid IV” by LauraLewis23 is marked with CC BY 2.0.