A teacher can make a subject feel like a place where a student is allowed to exist.

A good teacher can make a subject into somewhere you are permitted to be. Not by lowering anything, but by treating your questions as reasonable and your presence as expected, so the field stops being a place you are visiting on sufferance. That permission often matters more than the content and lasts far longer.

If someone did that for you, telling them is worth the awkwardness. And where you know a field well, you can do the same for someone at very little cost by taking their question seriously in public. Whether a person continues often turns on this.