Why can't we answer questions?

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What's so hard about answering yes or no or I don't know and then giving out the details?


Oops I just did it too, didn't answer the question and gave out the detail.

Sometimes I have this problem. I'm not sure what details might be relevant to the person asking, or have little idea how much they know about whatever they're asking. I don't want to seem like I'm being condescending, but I also don't want them to be confused by an answer that's "over their head." That said, I usually end up over-answering rather than under-answering.

Or more often, I will answer the question as literally asked rather than the "intended" question.

It can be frustrating both for me and the person I'm talking to. They think they're asking something seemingly simple, and they either get an answer so terse as to be useless, or an infodump that's just as useless.

I can answer questions just fine, mostly.
Open-ended ones give me trouble because I have trouble figuring out what information the person is actually after.
But simple yes or no ones- no problem.

At one point, when my AS symptoms were a lot stronger, I found myself unable to respond to questions a friend was asking me.. at the time, I was in the middle of learning all about AS & was able to recognize the symptom in myself after a few frustrating minutes of him repeatedly asking various questions and me not answering. I explained that I "couldn't," answer because the phrasing of the question "Why do you not care?" didn't allow for an accurate honest answer, so rather than be able to think of an alternative response, since I was unable to offer any logical truthful response to that question - my brain just shut off and I became momentarily non-verbal, further pissing him off. We discussed this at length & I explained that I couldn't respond because everything is logical black & white like a computer programming language and there was no possible answer I could give because the question was loaded, pre-determining that I didn't care & expecting an explanation as to why I did not care when in fact the truth of the matter is that I did care. Since stating that I did care wasn't a valid rigid answer to "Why do you not care?" I "couldn't," respond & just froze instead, thanks to my AS symptoms acting up strongly then.

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No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.

On a related note, I absolutely loathe "can you give me a ballpark figure?". I find that I have an incredibly difficult time and am even often incapable of providing "rough estimates". I either struggle to express a coherent thought or I search for an exact answer, often resulting in a "well I could have done that" response.