I struggle at times, I’m not sure where it came from, I don’t know it it’s some remnant of a life spent asking myself every other question. I have a hard time not knowing why.
Not in any particular way, but in a very general sense, I want to know why something works the way it does. I did a test the other day. it was meant to determine one’s bias towards associating men and women with family and career. Rather then focusing on the test, which was basically a word association game. I couldn’t help but focus on how it worked, Until I understood how it worked, and why it did what it did. I figured it out while I was writing the test, but likely skewed my results because of the brainpower I put into figuring out the game.
For those that are curious it compared the time it took you to respond in different scenarios to different word associations. If I had of known it was going to explain that to me at the end, I wouldn’t have needed to think it through.
Which comes to my point, I struggle when I don’t know why something is the way that it is. I want to know how to works, I want to know why someone made it. I like knowing the who, the what, even the where and when can be interesting, how is usually important to breaking something down, but I need to know why. I need a purpose, I need a goal. I need to understand why someone put the effort into something in the first place.
Which is a struggle for me at times, because I don’t often have a ready answer. It challenges me in the workplace, because I want to very much to ascribe some grand plan, or well executed thought to an action of a co-worker or boss. Yet often there isn’t one. I’m not a fan of something happening because of apathy or lack of attention. It means that there is no reason something happened, there is no why.
I’ve been talking about motivation a lot lately, and it often comes down to why. If I don’t feel like my purpose, and the purpose of others are in alignment I struggle. I need to know that there’s more to something then inertia. The worst answer I can ever hear to a question is that “it is because it is.”
I’ve put a lot of effort in my life into knowing myself, and I’m not particularly good at it, but it’s a lifelong goal, and part of knowing yourself is why you do what you do, and we live in a social world, nothing is an effort of one. Knowing the why around you helps you understand yourself.
Confessions of a Trans Professional 