a lesson learned from a brief stint as prom queen

Being the different one makes you constantly wonder—is it because I’m white? Or American? Or just a new person? Wondering what impossible thing you could change about yourself to make the experience less awkward while knowing that it’s probably all these things together. It doesn’t matter whether you’re getting treated well or badly on account of being different. Sometimes getting treated badly is almost better, because you can ignore it. Getting treated nicely for it makes you feel guilty and then makes you feel contempt for the people doing it, for their ignorance of how ordinary you actually are.

The thing is I, and maybe many people, while we want to be known as someone “special” and “unique”, don’t want to be treated any differently as a rule. Much as you wouldn’t like to be the only one in your group that no one talked to, you wouldn’t like to be the only one whose birthday was ever celebrated, would you? Or the only one anyone ever said anything nice about?

Either way of special treatment is an incomplete recognition of who we are as people. We want others to recognize that we have strengths, because we need our confidence bolstered for it to carry on. We want others to recognize that we have weaknesses, because we need to know that we don’t have to forfeit our confidence on their account. Do you see what I mean? Recognition of both things makes us feel a right to the confidence we need to function.

Here is my inspirational thought for the day—do your heroes the favor of recognizing that they are all big screw-ups, while treating them no differently than you used to. And to those you pity or kind of despise, go on doing what you’re probably already trying to do. Recognize that in both cases, you’re only treating a whole human being like half of one.

(from march of 2007 in roseau, dominica)