Learning sometimes begins with discovering that you had been answering a different question.

Much of what feels like confusion is really misalignment. You have been solving carefully, with real effort, a problem adjacent to the one in front of you, and every answer comes back slightly wrong for reasons you cannot locate. When the actual question comes into focus, the difficulty often collapses on its own. That moment tends to feel like failure and is usually the beginning of understanding.

If something has held you up for a while, stop working on it and write out what you believe the question is. Then ask someone closer to it whether that is really what is being asked.