As a white Christian woman who loves blanket scarves and lattes, I fall into a category of "basic" and despite the current trend of accepting that one is basic, I choose to defy it. Don't hear me wrong, I'm sure I would be one to fit the mold perfectly and I don't think any less of those who embrace their title, but basic is only skin deep.
(Image from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
There's a brilliant word, sonder, that is defined as "the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own" and that is the reason I think basic is not a good word for anyone. Each life and each person you pass has a past and a future that you can never know each individual entity of. As much as a sister or a significant other can tell you about their deepest thoughts, you can never know them all fully. Every life has ups and downs, crushes and hatreds, and while you may just see them through a car window at a stoplight, they dream just as big as you, if not bigger. On the highway, every car you pass has the most complex life form known to man in it, breathing and thinking and loving and there's no way that something so beautiful can be basic.
So while I'm sure my Starbucks cup in my hand would argue otherwise, I resent the word basic. I plan to work my butt off one day in the job field of my dreams and I study hard to learn about our human bodies and our government alike and I live and I love and I think thoughts that no one else could possibly fathom. I have a background like no one else's and a future that's unparalleled. And the most beautiful part about this? It's all mine and it's all who I am and everyone has their own chapter of it. I am not basic; I am not typical. I lead a complex life as complex as the lady next to me in the coffee shop right now and the UPS man outside. Basic covers the smallest parts of the human life that are negligible compared tot he potential we each have as an individual. So next time you see a "basic white girl" doing "basic white girl things", I challenge you to imagine the ins and outs of her life and give her a story as deep and rich as your own and tell me again how ordinary she is.
