Question

According to the entry about you on Wikipedia, you studied in a yeshiva high school and in a hesder program. After the army you moved closer to secular views (by the way, I remember you wrote that your parents laughed at you when you told them about a fellow who was cured of jaundice using pigeons. Were they secular?), then you returned to religion and studied in several Haredi institutions, while at the same time pursuing academic studies. 
Your posts and your ability to express your thoughts in speech and writing are extremely, extremely impressive. The questions I’m going to ask are asked in complete seriousness, and I apologize in advance if they create any uncomfortable feeling.
I’m curious where you “got it” from. Did you take courses from someone in an organized way, like what you do on YouTube? Does it come from books? Did you always know that you wanted to be a “thinking person” and to engage in this? Did your abilities improve over the years, or were you always smart and the study of philosophy only sharpened things that were already there? Are there things you thought or wrote once that today make you say to yourself, “What nonsense I was talking”? Did you always have the confidence to present your views without fear, or did it take time before you trusted your own abilities? Did someone encourage you to express your views in public? At the beginning, were you “afraid” that people smarter than you would laugh at you and point out your ignorance? Were you afraid of “losing” an argument with someone? Roughly when did you feel that you could disagree with people greater and better than yourself—both fellow Jews and non-Jews—on a variety of topics, and that you did not fall short of them in your abilities?
With God’s help, when I grow up (I’m 16 and a half, yeshiva high school, my father became religious, my mother is not religious. There are many discussions at home), I also want to express myself like that, and to distinguish between very, very subtle distinctions. There are times when I don’t understand at all what the difference is between one view and another. The problem is that my toolbox is still empty for now. Not to mention the discouraging fact that most of the time I can’t fully follow your thinking and don’t understand what you’re talking about. Even when I try to think independently about a certain topic, I discover that I don’t know how to decide between the thoughts in one direction or the other, and everything gets mixed up for me. For example, I read one article by Yuval Noah Harari and it was very convincing; afterward I read a response of yours and it too was very convincing. It scares me that I’ll always agree with the conclusions of the last person I read. Very often there are also worries like: what will other smart people say about this? Do I have backing? If they didn’t say what I’m saying, then what are the chances that I’m right? I wonder what Michael Abraham thinks about X, I wonder what Jordan Peterson thinks about Y—surely what they say is the truth… Every so often I find in your writing and in that of other thinkers ideas that I myself had thought of in a really rudimentary, childish, superficial way, and then suddenly I see that you expand, explain, and clarify the topic in an envy-provoking way. How?