They say you should never judge someone too quickly, that you should never exclude anyone even if they are different from you, and that you should learn to love everyone. While we all completely agree with these statements, how many times have we failed to follow them? How many times have we failed to look beyond people’s appearances and outer personalities and into the layers that make up their identity?
As humans, it is our instinct to categorize, to place others into mental boxes for the sake of making getting to know them simpler. And unfortunately, this mentality is not uncommon.
Novelist Chimamanda Adichie expresses her experience with what she calls “the danger of a single story” in her 2009 TEDGlobal talk. Adichie, originally from Nigeria, attended university in America. And even before Adichie’s roommate meets her, she has already formed opinions of the Nigerian girl -- that Adichie doesn’t know how to use a stove, that she listens to “tribal music” and that she is just like every African the media portrays: poor and deserving of pity.
Adichie’s roommate had only ever been exposed to one side of Adichie’s identity; thus, instead of viewing Adichie as an individual she made assumptions based on what she thought she knew about African culture, ignoring the many layers that made Adichie a unique human being.
And it is these many layers that so many students uncovered in others at Own Oxford, a pre-orientation program for rising Emory University students. With only about 50 students in the program, the feeling of community existed from the very beginning. And after we divided into groups, this feeling grew immensely.
“Tell us your life story.” Such was the task for each of us in one of our daily group sessions, a task that prompted feverish thinking, writing and drawing. While we weren’t obligated to tell everything that made us who we are, each group member expressed their own significant life memories, from wishing to be the President of the United States to grieving over the death of a family member. Every story instigated a sense of compassion, understanding and most importantly awareness in all of us.
After writing my life timeline, I scanned it briefly, preparing myself to talk openly about my father’s death and how it impacted me. I was certain there would be little to no emotion in my presentation -- his passing had happened roughly seven years ago. But when my turn came, I felt my heart racing with thoughts about how my group members would perceive me. Would this be whom they saw me as? The girl who didn’t have a dad?
As soon as I opened my mouth I felt my voice tremble and my eyes water. I felt powerless and hopeless until the very end, when I burst into tears in front of the group. But in that moment I felt relieved to have let out my difficult past, something I had only done a few times before with those whom I truly knew.
But this time, the people I barely knew became the people who knew me best. After the meeting, one of the group members tapped me on the shoulder, saying, “I know you felt vulnerable, but you are strong -- it wasn’t your fault.”
Hearing these comforting words, I realized that my father’s death was the very experience that has shaped my entire identity.
Our true identity is not the clothes we wear, the words we speak, or even the experiences we have. We are so much more than our race, gender and the stereotypes associated with them. We are more than a single story. We are beautifully indescribable.