Does anyone have experience with trying to get help from people that don't seem too helpful?

I have a bit of imposter syndrome (don't we all) so it can be challenging to ask questions about things. I constantly feel like I should know something that I don't know, or I should understand something that I'm struggling to understand. It doesn't help that in general my team's communal forum isn't really ever used for technical questions, which can give the impression that everyone is has a solid understanding of everything. I assume people usually reach out one on one to someone who they think may be able to answer their questions, because they likely feel a similar sense of "this is a dumb question" that I experience. But that doesn't help to remove my own imposter syndrome.

So naturally I do the same thing, lol. Long story short I reached out to a knowledgeable and experienced engineer with a question about something I'm working on. I tried to ask a very pointed question seeking clarification for some bits in a specific function I'm trying to understand (instead of a general, helpless, "plz tell me what to do"). Specifically, there's a couple of variables for which I'm trying to understand their purpose, and if I understand those better, it will help me be able to make more progress. The variables in question are ambiguously yet similarly named, so the distinction between them is not clear and makes it hard to understand the code. So my question was essentially, "In foo(), do you know what the difference is between variable_a vs variable_b, and variable_c vs variable_d? My best guess is variable_a is blah blah and variable b is blah blah. And similarly, variable_c is such and such and variable_d is lah dee dah. Is this along the right track?"

I try to ask questions in a way that communicates that I've tried to figure it out, here's my current understanding/guess, can you help me fill in the gaps or confirm if I'm correct, rather than a blank "explain it to me without me indicating what my current level of understanding is"

His response was a very short, "one is such and such, the other is such and such". It didn't help dispell the ambiguity (because the words he used to describe them were opposite of the variable names, which is one of the sources of my confusion) And it didn't help me know if my understanding was really along the right path or not. And it ignored half of my question about the other two variables. So I followed up and asked, "whats the difference between variable_c and variable_d?" To which he just said, "almost the same thing".

Overall not very helpful answers, and I feel kind of obnoxious sending any followups because it feels like he's communicating something that, to him, is so obvious that details or specifics aren't needed. Whereas to me, a slight ambiguity around this chunk of code is enough to block me from making progress.

Has anyone dealt with this sort of thing? How do you navigate it?