Pilot Episode (Transcript).
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Giovanni’s Room presents Why, a series that invites you down the rabbit hole as we ask the question why over and over and over again until we get as close as we can to the truth of ourselves.
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Hola, hola. Welcome to the inaugural episode of Why, the series that takes us back to the terrible twos and delves into the why, behind the why, behind the why of the things we do as humans. I’m your host, Jota. And in this first episode, we’re going to begin by asking why we stopped asking ourselves why in the first place.
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The ideas and views expressed in this series are my own and do not represent the Giovanni’s Room organization as a whole. While scientific data and principles of Western medicine and psychology may be discussed, none of what’s presented here is professional advice.
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Have you ever played the why game with a two year old? I’ll set the scene for you. You’re about to go outside to play and you tell the two year old that they have to put on their shoes first and they ask why? And you say, well, to protect your feet, to keep them from getting dirty and you don’t want to hurt your little toes. That would be bad. And they say, why? You say, because then you might get a cut and it will hurt and it could get infected.
Why? Well because there are all kinds of germs and bacteria outside on the ground that are dangerous for our bodies. Why? Because we’re human beings. We don’t have fur or a shell or scales to protect us. You know how there are some animals that eat other animals? Well, the germs are kind of like tiny little animals that eat us. We don’t want to be eaten. We want to stay alive. Why?
Because life is so fun and we have all these fun things to do like play outside and eat lunch and paint. But why? Because that’s why we’re here on this planet to spend time together and do fun things. But why? They invariably push you all the way to the end of why. Because you find yourself at the why that you don’t have an answer for.
that you can’t pick up your phone and Google or find in a book, a dictionary, an encyclopedia. For me, the why phase began a little later than two years old, hashtag neurodivergence. I was about four when I first started to ask my parents why. And now at the age of 40, I realized that I spent my entire life playing the why game. I did eventually graduate from asking my parents why over and over and over again.
I went to kindergarten and first grade and second, and that super cute game that my mom and dad used to love playing with me was suddenly not so adorable. They seemed to get tired of answering question after question, and I learned to seek the answers on my own. As I sit here now, recording this, 36 years later, I realize that for me, why isn’t really a game? It’s how I live my life.
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Thinking about the current moment that we find ourselves in, in the United States of America, in the West, in the global South, in the world, one of the things that I’ve come to understand about how we got here in the first place on the verge of sliding into absolute tyranny with our rights and liberties being stripped away daily, homelessness and joblessness running rampant through our communities, forced starvation in Sudan and Gaza.
real-time scenes portraying genocide on our screens. What all of that boils down to for me is that almost all of the people sitting around watching these things happen, the majority of people with social and political power who were elected to run our societies, who could put an end to this tomorrow, they stopped asking why a long time ago. They’re doing what has been prescribed, what’s expected.
what has become their default. They’re doing nothing.
As I witness all of this from my little apartment in the mountains of Centro America, where I live as a Black American refugee, I can’t help but wonder how many things would be different, how the country, the continent, the world might look if others hadn’t abandoned themselves in the second grade, if they hadn’t stopped being so inconveniently curious. Where would I be? Where would we be if we hadn’t stopped asking
Why?
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The thing about the question of why also is that when you exist in the minority, when you are black living in white American society, when you are assigned female at birth living in a misogynistic and patriarchal society, when you are queer living in straight society and trans non-binary living in cisgendered society, the question of why comes up a lot. But if you are straight,
If you are cis and white, if you are a man, if you’re upper middle class and without disability, then it is so much easier for you to go along with the prescription that you’re given for life. Going along seems to mean that you’re inherently going to win. So why not just do what you’re told? When you exist on the margins of the margins, when your sense of self and self-worth cannot be handed to you and upheld by the rules of polite society,
You ask why because you have no choice. You are the question. You have to question the norms because they’re telling you that you as you are should not exist. For us, why is a question of survival. And now, if it wasn’t before, it is the question of survival for you too.
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Why are some people rich when others are poor? This was one of the first questions I asked my parents when I was seven or eight that really seemed to piss them off. I had a class trip or something like that and I have a twin brother so my parents were going to have to come up with double the money so that we could both go and money was tight. And I went to this predominantly white school and none of my peers were talking about not being able to afford the trip. And I started thinking, I was like, wait,
Why is this a conversation that I’m having to have with my parents when my peers don’t seem to have to worry at all? And I came to my parents with this question. And I think the answer they gave me was something about what kind of job you have. And then the next question I had was, but why? Why do some jobs pay more than others? Who decides which jobs pay what amount of money? That was the point at which they didn’t want to have the conversation anymore.
Of course, now I understand why it’s such an uncomfortable topic. You start with arguments about skilled versus unskilled labor, but when you get all the way to the end of that why game, there are some pretty ugly truths about what’s actually going on. But in 1992, with exhausted and overworked parents, the question of why they worked more hours than the parents of any of my peers, but still never seemed to have enough money,
was the end of the “why?” journey. The internet didn’t exist yet, at least not for the average person. And all I had was a dictionary, a volume of encyclopedias, and a seven-year-old understanding of the world. There was no functional way for me to look up the answer to why we were struggling to afford to do much more than clothe, feed, and house ourselves. For reference, I went to this little boutique early childhood center in Tribeca.
It was basically what New York City did instead of actually desegregating its schools. We’ll get to that in another episode. Most of my peers though were white. I had a best friend who was biracial. There was Annie and Lucy Molly. They were African twins. There was an Asian kid and a Puerto Rican kid, but by and large the kids around me were some flavor of white. Jewish, Italian, Greek, Irish, white. But even though that was the end of that
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particular quest to figure out what the difference was between me and my peers, between their understanding of jobs and work and mine, that way of being, that way of questioning the rules and realities I encountered, that followed me throughout my life in every facet of my being.
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When I was eight years old in the summer of 1988, my twin brother and I were playing some sort of game with swords made of empty tubes of wrapping paper. We were running around shirtless in the heat of our apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn when my great aunt Arlene came over to visit from the building next door. We were in the middle of the game as I ran past her and she grabbed me by the arm and said, you need to put on a shirt young lady. You’re getting too old for that.
And the first thing I thought was, why? You know, I looked exactly the same as my twin brother did with my shirt off, completely flat chested and well, childlike. And yes, my mother had had the talk with us about bodies and puberty and what was going to happen. But what did my great aunt mean in that moment? Why did I have to put on a shirt now for this thing that might come in the future? That was what my eight year old mind asked.
And when I couldn’t come up with an answer that made any sense to me, I just wriggled away and kept on playing with my brother.
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So this morning I was scrolling TikTok and I saw a video about a woman who’s 32 years old. She’s been married for 10 years and she has three children. And she was talking about maybe wanting to get a divorce. She said, you know, I really don’t know what’s wrong with my marriage. There isn’t anything about my husband that I don’t love. I just know that I’m not fulfilled. And the thing that’s even more difficult, she said, is that she doesn’t even really know who she is.
And so I’m watching this video and I can tell that it feels very vulnerable for her to say all of this, that she’s not happy in her life and that she doesn’t quite know why because she doesn’t really know who she is. And the first question that came to mind for me was, why? Why did you get married? Why do people get married in the first place? And I realized that she probably doesn’t know the answer to that question, not the real why behind the why.
I don’t believe in the institution of marriage. And the reason is that I started asking myself the question of why, and I went down the rabbit hole until I got to my end, and there really wasn’t any reason to do it. There wasn’t a reason to get the government involved in my dating life and legally tie myself to another person. Now, I also don’t believe in monogamy because again, you know, in my early relationships, I was doing perfunctory monogamy.
And I started to ask myself why I was going along with the default. I had this one girlfriend who was like 10 years older than I was. And we’d go out dancing with friends and she’d get jealous and I would not understand it at all. And I’d be like, why? Like what is actually going on here? And she would tell me that I had done something wrong by dancing with someone else. Now, mind you, I have never cheated on anyone and I didn’t cheat on her, but just dancing or showing attention to someone else.
to my own friends, my best friend, was seen as inappropriate and unacceptable to her. And I kept asking myself the question of why. Going down the rabbit hole is what led me to let go of monogamy. Because there didn’t really seem to be any good reason why I should pedestalize this romantic and sexual relationship over the relationships I had with my friends and community members. Those were equally important to me.
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They in fact were the ones that were less likely to end. Even if you subscribe to the soulmate theory of dating, all of my romantic relationships were going to end until one didn’t. So why would I put all of my friends who are persistent and steadfast in my life on the back burner while chasing this perfect soulmate? And so this is the model that I have carried force in life from the very beginning. Always ask yourself why.
So of course the question I asked myself as I sat there listening to this poor woman on TikTok, not know if she wanted to get a divorce, not even know who she is, is why? Why doesn’t she know any of these things? And one of the hypotheses that I have is that she stopped asking the question of why. And then I had to ask myself why? Why do people stop asking why?
What happens to us from the age of two when why is literally our favorite word? When why is the cutest thing in the world to the adults in our lives to 32 with three children not knowing who we are and how we got to where we are. At some point, I think we abandon our young curious selves and we stop asking this critical question.
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What I’ve come up with so far is that I think I was really, really, really privileged in a way to attend a kind of academic institution starting all the way from pre-K that fostered my why, that fostered my curiosity. Now granted, by the time I turned six, when I got home from school and my parents got home from work, they were exhausted. They didn’t want to hear anymore. But I was still lucky enough for six to eight hours a day
to be in a classroom setting where my teachers praised me for my questions, praised my why, praised me for digging and digging and digging until I got to an answer that made sense to me. When I look at that facet of the boutique New York City schools that I went to, and I contrast it with the average public school experience and ask, is why a question that is valued and nurtured and welcomed in public education?
The answer is, it happens fucking literally not. When I was in the third grade, I went for one year of my entire education to a regular public school in New York City. It was called PS 234 and it was right down the street from the little boutique school I had gone to. It was near the West Side Highway in the borough of Manhattan Community College where my mother went to school to become a teacher. I can still to this day feel in my body the experience that I had
because it was one of the most traumatic academic experiences of my life. I stepped through the big iron gates of that schoolyard and suddenly asking why was viewed as disrespectful and insubordinate. I was told that I was holding up everyone else’s learning and that why was disruptive. When you go from an educational environment where there are 20 students in your class tops,
where there are student teachers and plenty of room to roam and there isn’t the expectation that you have to stay sitting in the meeting area, even if you get tired and antsy. When you call all of your teachers by their first names and you get to be inquisitive all the way to the end. And even if there isn’t time in that moment, the teacher says, let’s talk about it more in free play. And they actually come back and say, hey, I’m available for your question now. When you come from an environment like that,
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And then you go to a standard public school that is downright carceral in nature with the time out chair and the go to the principal’s office. It is one of the most dehumanizing and traumatizing things you can imagine. And then I asked myself, what would it be like if that had been my academic environment from day one? What if I had continued in those schools and those environments where there were
30 of us and we were worried about standardized testing and we had to get through the material instead of being excited and inquisitive, instead of the spaciousness that I experienced. If that had been my life, I might’ve abandoned my why too. In that environment, why is dangerous. Now don’t get me wrong, I was stubborn as a motherfucker, okay?
I look back on my childhood and I think my parents who were teenagers when they started having children were definitely not ready for me. Very few parents would have been ready for a child like me. But I can’t imagine how much more damage a school like PS 234 would have done if it had kept me for more than one year. I felt so beaten down by that experience in the third grade that I started a club with three of my classmates.
These kids were the other frequent visitors to the time out chair. And we started a club where we got one of those black and white notebooks and every day at free time, we would spend 15 or 20 minutes together writing down all of the injustices that had been perpetrated against us by the teachers and the hall monitors and the lunchroom staff at the school. The name that we came up with for the club was the what club, the we hate all teachers club.
We hate all teachers. This is what happened to my body, my psyche, my soul in the one year that it was being stifled and shamed in that place. And the same thing happened to my club mates. I mean, we felt so disrespected and so dehumanized that we developed an animosity for our oppressors in the span of months.
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I had come from a school where my teacher’s names were Rhea and Linda and Amy to miss this and Mrs. So-and-so. To this day, I do not remember the name of my third grade teacher. I don’t even remember what she looked like. That is the level of pain that I suffered in that place. And so when I think about this woman on TikTok and about what she’s discovering, really for the first time in her life, I think you must have had an academic or religious or home life experience.
that was something like the third grade at PS 234. Year after year, you were forced to stifle your why, to box it in. You were told what you could and couldn’t ask questions about. You were told that there were things you didn’t need to know. And don’t get me wrong, I grew up in a black household in the 90s. I was definitely told to stay in a child’s place and mind my business enough of the time. But my mother is a teacher.
Part of her training involved having to practice her vocation on us. So at least some of the time at home, I was allowed to be inquisitive too. And then every Monday through Friday at 5.30 AM, I would wake up, get dressed and walk up the hill at Kingston Avenue to the three train and ride the subway to Manhattan where I would get this soft and welcoming education that never gave me the impression that why?
wasn’t an acceptable question. So one of my suspicions about why so many have abandoned their why and how we got to this place in history is that we have a public education system that is stifling instead of nurturing children. Because when you have to control 30 kids, there isn’t time for why. When you have to be concerned with
standardized tests and meeting goals set by people who are entirely too far removed from both children and education, actual academic exploration goes out the window. I was lucky enough to have a parent who had the knowledge and the forethought to not just send me to the PS school around the corner from my house, who made the time to take me two hours round trip on the train every day to a place that was going to welcome and nurture.
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my why.
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The other thing that made it easy for me to continue to ask the question of why is that I have a twin brother. So as misogyny, rape culture, and patriarchy came to the forefront of my life, I was literally watching in real time someone who was in the womb with me, who was the same age, treated very differently. And over and over again, the question I was asking my parents is why? Why is it that my brother can go do this thing that I can’t?
because it’s dangerous for me. Why is it dangerous for me and not him? Because men and boys are dangerous. Why are they dangerous? because they’re rapy and murdery and assaulted. Why? Why is that acceptable in society? And so this question of why haunted me, followed me throughout my childhood, growing up side by side with this boy who was having a very different experience. And so in a lot of ways, neurodivergence, being a twin, and of course,
being black in a white academic setting, being in poverty and surrounded by peers who were upper and upper middle class. So why just like literally kept coming up in my life over and over and over again? And I kept asking, what is the difference? know, gender, socioeconomic status, why is it acceptable for my brother to make this joke, but then I make the same joke and it’s not funny? All of these things were swirling around and I realized
that these particular intersections at which I sit, while difficult to live and exist in, were a privilege and really did me a great service in not allowing me to abandon my why. I might not have ever known that I was gender nonconforming if I didn’t have this boy right next to me doing things that I wanted to do and I wasn’t being shamed for doing those exact same things.
And so I just wonder again, keep thinking about this woman and I have so many questions about how you can get to be 32 years old and not know who you are. Did she have any siblings? What part of the country did she grow up in? What was happening culturally and societally while she was growing up? All of these things really play a big role in who we become and how and why we abandon ourselves and go along with the prescription that we’re given for life.
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What prescription was she given as a white little girl and then a white woman wherever she was? And how was it different from what I was told?
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So that’s how we got here. That’s how I got to this series and why I feel called to and excited about reintroducing why into our everyday lives. And it’s a marathon, not a sprint. I’m not saying that we can ask these questions daily in every facet of our lives. We’re going to fall apart. You know, we’re going to crumble, but we’re going to come back as someone new, someone that we recognize as ourselves. And through that self-knowledge,
I think we’ll be more empowered to be active participants in creating a world that we actually want to live in. So join me next week on why, as we talk about the why of relationships and marriage and how we turned into a society where marriage was the expectation and the default.