Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

For a long time, confusion felt like a verdict on me. That foggy, lost feeling when a new concept wouldn’t click — I read it as evidence that I wasn’t smart enough, that everyone else had some clarity I lacked, that I’d been found out. So I’d rush to make the feeling go away, grab the quick answer, and move on without ever really understanding.

What changed was noticing that the people I admired — the ones who seemed to grasp hard things effortlessly — weren’t skipping the confusion. They’d just felt it so many times that they’d stopped panicking about it. To them, being lost wasn’t a threat. It was a familiar stage, the ordinary weather of learning something real.

That reframing did something quietly powerful. Confusion, it turns out, is what understanding feels like from the inside before it finishes forming. The fog isn’t the absence of learning. It’s the sensation of it happening, in real time, before the picture resolves.

So now, when I hit that lost feeling, I try not to flinch away from it. I stay in it a little longer. I let myself not know, on purpose, trusting that the discomfort is the process and not a sign I’ve failed at it. The clarity comes on the far side of the fog, and never before it.

I don’t fear not knowing anymore. I’ve come to read it as proof I’m standing exactly where the learning is.

– Serguey Asael Shinder