There is a difference between a question that is hard and a question that is not welcome, and the two are very rarely separated. A hard question is simply one nobody has answered yet, and asking it makes a person interesting, and others will sit with them and turn it over. An unwelcome question is one that everybody around them has agreed not to raise, and asking it makes them strange. The second kind is the expensive one, and it is expensive in a currency that cannot be earned back.
Every group has its unwelcome questions. Every family, every profession, every community, every friendship of long standing. They are not written anywhere and there is no announcement and nobody could produce the list if asked for it. The boundary is discovered by walking into it, usually once, and the response teaches very quickly that somewhere has been entered that was not meant to be entered.
The response is rarely anger, which is what people expect. Anger would at least be engagement, and something could be done with it. What actually happens is subtler and worse. A silence. A change of subject that is slightly too smooth. A look exchanged that is meant to be seen. And afterwards, a small adjustment in how that person is regarded, which nobody will ever mention and which does not go away.
What the cost actually is
Most people imagine that the price of asking is being argued with, and they prepare for the argument. It is not the argument. The price is being recategorised. Somebody stops being one of us with an unusual thought and becomes somebody a bit odd, a bit difficult, a bit too much. And once that has happened, everything they say afterwards is read through that heading, including the entirely ordinary things.
That is a real loss and pretending otherwise does not help. Belonging is not a small matter and we are built for it, right down in the oldest part of us. To be quietly moved to the edge of a group somebody has been inside their whole life is genuinely painful, and it does not stop being painful because they happened to be right about the question.
So most people, having felt that response once, put the question down. Not because they were convinced by anything, because nothing was said. They put it down because the cost was made clear and the cost was more than the question seemed to be worth at the time. Almost everybody does this for years and calls it maturity rather than fear.
Where the questions go
But a question that has been put down is not a question that has gone. It moves somewhere else and it waits, and it is patient in a way that is almost frightening. People who have put down a great many questions carry a particular kind of restlessness, which they usually explain in entirely different terms. Work stress. Tiredness. A phase. It is very seldom recognised for what it is, which is a large quantity of unfinished thought with nowhere at all to go.
There is another thing that happens too, and it is worse. Where a person cannot ask, they gradually stop being able to think properly about the subject at all, because thinking is mostly asking. So an entire area of their life becomes a place they simply do not go. That is survivable and most people manage it. But the area does not shrink over time. It grows, and it takes more and more energy to walk around it, and the walking around eventually shapes the route of everything else.
And there is a particular version of this that women have carried for a very long time, which should not go unsaid. Certain questions have been treated as not belonging to a woman at all, regardless of what she has studied or how she has lived or what she is capable of. Her responsibilities are named for her, and anything beyond them is considered unnecessary. That is not a remark about any individual family. It is a very old arrangement and it is still working exactly as it was built to.
Asking anyway
There is no method for making it cost less, and anybody offering one should be distrusted. It costs what it costs. What is worth saying is only this. The people who ask are not braver than the people who do not, and the opposite is often implied. They have usually just reached a point where not asking has become more expensive than asking.
That point arrives at a different time for everybody, and for some it does not arrive in this lifetime at all. Those who are not asking are not failing at anything. Their moment has not come, and that is all it is. When it does come, it will not feel like courage from the inside. It will feel much more like something that can no longer be avoided, which is a different sensation altogether and considerably less flattering.
What changes in people who keep going is that they stop expecting the questions to be welcome, and stop asking them of people who do not want them, which saves everybody a good deal of discomfort. The questions get asked instead at night, in the quiet, where there is nobody to be made uncomfortable and nobody to be lost. It is slower and there is no one to correct a wrong turn. But nothing gets put down, and after enough years that turns out to matter more than the speed.
