Questions

I used to think asking questions was a good thing.

And it can be–but not the way I was often doing it. We are taught in our society that asking questions is always a good thing, but we are never asked to distinguish between asking questions out of insecurity and asking questions out of a desire to learn more.

And there’s a key difference between the two: asking out of insecurity comes from a place of negativity, whereas asking out of desire to learn more comes from a place of positivity. One comes from not believing in oneself, and the other comes from believing in oneself as well as one’s ability to take on even more.

In the past, I always asked lots of questions. Teachers loved it–they saw it as me being engaged in the class and always wanting to know more. It was a sign of intelligence, to be so aware of the gap between my knowledge and the full understanding of a subject. And while I am a person who always loves to learn more, that wasn’t REALLY why I was asking.

I was asking because I was afraid I couldn’t come up with answers myself. I was asking because, even if I did come up with an answer, it wouldn’t be the “right” one. I was asking because authority would be able to give me a sense of a security that I desperately craved. I was asking because I needed someone outside of myself to hold me in space.

I have one distinct memory of asking my senior year high school math teacher about how to do a problem. For some reason, no matter how many questions I asked, I could NOT comprehend how to solve this particular problem…which was odd…because I knew that over time I would get it–this concept was newly taught to us, and, yes, this class was SUPER hard. But I didn’t trust that I could go through and figure out how to solve this problem, and so I never did.

So what did I do on tests or in performances when I didn’t have a teacher to guide me and acknowledge my inquisitiveness as a sign of being on the right path? I often bombed. Even though I was just as smart and prepared as the others around me, I bombed before I could even try. And that was my defense–to screw it up before I gave myself a chance.

So basically, I’ve seriously slowed down asking others for…anything. Over the past few weeks I’ve stopped Googling things, texting others for “advice” (mostly haha), or even allowing my mind to think that someone out there is going to save me–and this is super hard and scary. If I can’t depend on others to bail me out, I guess it’s ME who is left in charge. And indirectly, someone made it apparent to me that maybe this is the kind of isolation I need, or that we all need, at least until we can exist as ourselves.

And to conclude, I will share a beautiful metaphor one of my mentors shared with me. She told me, “Katie. Some people can exist as birds–once they heal their ancestors and their current selves, they are done. But you are like a tree–you’ve taken on so much of the world and brought so much into your space, so either you uproot and fly away to become that bird, or you are left healing everyone and everything just so you can be left with enough energy to exist and stand still in one spot on the Earth.”