Lately, I have been pondering the power of the question. Not any particular question, but the desire and ability to question itself. I have come to believe that every good endeavor or adventure starts with a question, and answers can change your life if you simply dare to ask for them.

I’d like to think, at some point, someone wondered if giving someone else blood is possible. Or how lemons grow from flowers. Or why the skies must turn gray before raining. There is so much more we know about the world today because someone dared to ask a question—perhaps a question that others found laughable or mundane.

Inquiring minds are not the norm. I have been realizing lately that there is a wide variety of people out there. People are different from each other, that is for sure. And many people don’t mind existing in a world in which they don’t necessarily understand their surroundings but are happy to take them for granted.

What actually is trauma?

This was a question that led to me reading “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk after my divorce from my first husband. I wanted to understand what was happening to my brain to help heal in as pragmatic and healthy a way possible—I was hoping to go on with a great life after the messy divorce was done and I was certainly hoping to fall in love again.

The book explained things about trauma I had experienced, but didn’t understand. In understanding my experience, I began to be able to see it as an observer would instead of taking the trauma for granted. I became a scientist who was conducting a science experiment on their own body instead of a patient of emotional trauma.

They say curiosity is a sign of intelligence. Intelligence, to many people, is just being real smart. A higher power, more functioning brain, in fact, something that you either have or don’t. It often has a connection with how much you know. The more you know, the more people expect you to be smart. My husband has jokingly called me cerebro, which is Spanish for brain, in front of people when I mention where I have previously worked.

I won’t argue with the validity of this argument, but generally, people often refrain from asking questions for fear of looking stupid. Teachers encourage students at the start of the school year to ask questions, but there is certainly a certain number that would be annoying, or perhaps a certain type. “Why aren’t Palestinians considered refugees?” was a question I asked my near eastern studies professor during my sophomore year at UC Berkeley. It was intentionally pointed, I admit, but I also wanted to learn what Professor Hayes would respond with—the truth or some malleable half version of it?

Still, I have always found it a paradox that people worry that they will look stupid if they ask questions. How can we be expected to know what we don’t know?

When I was in the fourth grade, a girl named Katina was selected for student of the week and got to make a poster about herself. She was proudly ⅛ Native American, something I didn’t know, and her mom, who was there for some reason that day, told us her nickname at home was “smile” in the indigenous American language her family had kept a relationship with. Katina told her mom she was embarrassing her.

Either way though, for some reason, I remember that student of the week presentation as if it was the only one that was ever done in my class, because Katina’s desired superpower, if she could have one, was to know everything.

I thought this was very interesting. Many kids, myself included, simply wanted to fly or be invisible. I have often wondered since then what inspired Katina to want to know everything? What would it be like to know everything, and if it is even conceivable or positive to know everything? Or if our heads would simply explode?

Many questions yield other questions.

And some questions lead to quests, out there in the world.

In 2010, I was at a dead end job as a sales order processor for a medical device company. It was the aftermath of 2008, in which talented young people even from prestigious colleges had to take jobs like being a sales order processor for a medical device company. I was challenged only on how to manage the amount of work laid on my plate, despite the fact that I am very fast when I am focused. I often stayed at work until 8pm to finish this mindless work that was just too much for one person.

On the side, I had started doing fashion photography. It was the thing at the time that kept me sane and allowed me to be creative. I spent all of my free time shooting, coordinating shoots, creating storyboards, reaching out to makeup artists and modeling agencies in San Francisco, and more. It was my outlet and hope. I made a blog to showcase my work and in an effort to get traction, would post images that I had styled on a fashion community website.

Eventually, someone did notice my work, the social media coordinator at a buy-sell-trade chain store called Crossroads. I was invited to a blogger event, and met Aimee Song of Song of Style, still wearing jeans like the rest of us common fashion-lovers, and Liz Cherkasova of the blog formerly known as Late Afternoon. This was before both were catapulted into the starlight of fashion, Aimee staying there and Liz choosing a slower pace of life at a farm in upstate New York.

This is all to say, I had no business being in this place. And yet I was.

While Aimee and Liz would go on to blog professionally, and Aimee eventually morphing into a fashion celebrity, I would take the job of the social media coordinator who invited me to the event eventually.

“Ask her for a job,” my best friend urged me. I felt embarrassed. I couldn’t. She pressed me more. 

“Why not?” has now become one of my favorite questions.

So I emailed the social media coordinator one day from my dead end job. “I was wondering…do you have any jobs available?” I can just imagine myself saying, the email somewhere in my sent folder if I really wanted to find it. Her name was Enid Hwang, and she told me that while she loved my work, there were no jobs available at the time. Oh well.

Nine months later, Enid emailed me that a job had indeed opened up—hers. She went on to become the community manager at a shiny, new, cool startup named Pinterest. Enid was one of the first employees for the unicorn, the result of a smart question she had asked when she reached out to the founder for a job. She would eventually trailblaze the space of online community management.

In that way, Enid and I are connected—our careers started at Crossroads and at a crossroads in which we could’ve asked an important question, or not. We both chose to ask. Words unleashed into the world and destinies of ourselves and no doubt those around us changed. 

Some years later, at another job, a coworker once told me a statement I quite enjoyed and remember to this day. “You get 0 percent of what you don’t ask for,” she said. 

Sometimes we ask questions to ourselves that we must answer. In high school, I learned about the Dia De Los Muertos celebration in Mexico in Spanish class. I longed to see it in real life and asked myself if this was plausible for me. Mexico seemed so very far away, I seemed so very young, and this dream felt so very distant and unreal. But somehow, I believed it to be real enough to put a pin on it, until two years after I joined Crossroads in 2013, I quit to travel the world.

I spent the summer in Europe and Egypt and was back in California by the fall for a friend’s wedding. My best friend, the same one who urged me to ask for a job, popped in and asked me, “Do you want to go to Day of the Dead in Mexico this year?” Our Mexican-American friend Eli was living in a place called Condesa in Mexico City. We could join him in his home country and see this amazing holiday we were both fascinated by. Would I go? Yes, yes I would.

Another thing I learned about in high school was Cuba and its revolution. I marveled at this place so close to the US that was not living under capitalism and was a real life example of a different perspective of how to live and govern. I was fascinated with Che with a sparkle in my eye as I read about him, and fascinated with Fidel in a way that made me fearfully respect him. Either way, I had the wisdom to appreciate something that was different from me and my own. “Do you want to go to Cuba this year?” I asked myself, and later my best friend, some time in 2016.  Yes, yes I did want to.

I mull over the variety of types of questions and relish the excitement, adventure, learning, and opportunity that can stem from a simple statement that ends with that curvy punctuation mark. The symbol for the question itself is unlike the period, which being a literal point seems to indicate the statement was to make its point and nothing else. The question mark on the other hand, with a seemingly curved road baked within it—the question market itself seems to stand for limitless and unknown potential to the answers that await you if you dare to ask.

Answers are important too, and some lead to more questions. The answers that lead to more questions are my favorite. Some questions lead to “no,” which is a dead end. A period. Some questions lead to “yes, and…” An ellipses, another type of punctuation I like, also as open ended I imagine as the roads that lead from California to Texas. A great adventure awaits in those roads, and that ellipses. 

I appreciate and enjoy so many types of questions. From “What is the history of gangster rap?” to “do you want to go to the Dominican Republic?” It can feel like all good in the world starts with a question. If we had no questions, perhaps we’d have no knowledge. Perhaps there would be no books. I imagine if there were books with no questions, they would each have a single page, with a single period on it.

Of all the types of questions, in my opinion, the best is the one you are brave enough to ask. 

A life with no questions to seek the answers to—well, that is not a life at all, or is it? 

Go ahead. The next time you are unsure of what someone means in a conversation, ask them. The next time you wonder what couches are made of, google it. The next time you want to extend a hand to a potential new friend, ask them for coffee. Just do it. Ask the question. 

Everything you want and more may be on the other side of the question.