This Is Us
The Problem Is We Don’t Know Who We Are
Gender, age, title only gets you so far. Show me the cracks in your foundation.
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“How old are you?” I texted this question to 56 people two weeks ago. I was prompted by the realization that, though I knew their secret hopes, their fears, their kinks, their childhood dreams, I didn’t know their ages. Like I had done friendship poorly and in reverse.
They all responded within minutes. A few teased me about forgetting their birthday. Some jokingly asked if I was a bot. At least 10 expressed that this is, by far, the easiest question I’ve ever asked them.
Name, age, gender, race — rattling off our identity markers is easy for most of us. After all, we’re used to defining ourselves in 160-word increments and lists of hobbies on social media profiles. But we’re kidding ourselves by thinking that humans fit neatly into one-word answers. Easily digestible data points. To really capture the humanity in that data, we’d need to put an asterisk next to each demographic dot.
Name: Miyah Byrd*
*My middle name is a cruel irony since I’m more of a skeptical agnostic nowadays. There are three visible scars from my childhood on my body and countless more on my heart that I wrap in beautiful packages and sell to people. At eight years old, I fell in love with the poems of a black woman with the same name as me. It took me 19 years to learn how to love people without kowtowing to them, and as my last name suggests, I definitely lean toward the flight side of fight-or-flight.
Age: 30*
*This isn’t the real me, and yet it is. There’s different versions of me, and they’re all the real me. And you know what? That kills me. It’s too confusing. I’m not one person. I’ve got a twentysomething body, an eight-year-old heart, 18-year-old mind, and 80-year-old soul.
Gender: Female*
*What the hell is gender? Why did I have “boy days” as a very young kid and purposefully dress in my brother’s clothing? Why did I act more brash, more self-assured on those days, like I instinctively knew a penis gave people certain rights I wasn’t going to have?
Race: African-American/Black*
*I used to take it as a compliment when people would say “You’re so articulate,” or, “You don’t count,” until I realized I was ingesting self-hate. Why am I drawn to the literature I love? Why did my heart feel at ease the second I landed in Jamaica? Were my ancestors Nigerian, Ethiopian, Ghanaian, Egyptian? Can I call myself African American if I can’t even pinpoint within 5,000 miles where my history originated?
Those are my asterisks. What are yours? Who are you, really? We quietly give our own census whenever we meet someone new. Politics. Religion. Hobbies. Music Taste. We use this information to decide whether we want to get to know someone better, collaborate, be friends, be lovers, be vulnerable. Is the story you’re writing one I want to read? All too often, we give ourselves extra space to write in our surrounding context without taking the time to learn about other people’s.
Without what we do, we don’t know who we are.
Whenever I ask people who they are, they’re puzzled. Does she want me to rattle off a list of my titles and relationships? Lawyer. Advocate. Dentist. Secretary. Mother. Father. Sister. Friend. No? Okay.
Maybe she wants my hobbies and geographical data? Painter. Baker. Runner. Musician. Grew up in Georgia before moving to Seattle. Lived in Maine my whole life. No?
Perhaps she’s digging for where I stand in our imaginary, arbitrary binary splits. Democrat vs. Republican. Urban vs. Rural. Marvel vs. DC.
I’ve stopped asking my Renaissance friends this question because it usually sends their heads into a tailspin. Most can’t leave a conversation without listing all of the skills and accomplishments they’ve racked up over their lifetime, but they’re not unique in this. As Americans, we equate our status with our soul. We use our careers as shorthand for our morality, our identity markers as shortcuts to our desirability. We have sex with each other’s titles and find our worth through our relationships. We use our demographic data as a substitute for the difficult work of self-examination. Self-discovery. We scoff at the idea of self-love then go home and numb ourselves.
If we tore ourselves from the never-ending rat race, shed our hobbies, forced ourselves to sit and think, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. Within weeks #quarantinspo was a real thing, because allowing ourselves the space to think over who we are and feel what we feel without shaming ourselves into 24/7 productivity is downright un-American. We needed to be bread-makers, fitness gurus, remote-work geniuses. Without what we do, we don’t know who we are.
We were never meant to substitute doing for being. Humans have three universal desires: to be safe, to be seen, to be loved.
All of us want to be safe. I can relax in this neighborhood, this space, with this person.
All of us want to be seen. You get me. I thought I was the only one who felt like that.
All of us want to be loved. You’re not going anywhere even if I hand you everything I don’t like about myself.
The stories we tell each other — of our titles and hobbies and census data — don’t get us there, though. They don’t capture our sense of inadequacy, of our missing pieces, of context. We don’t share the key highlights of our past, our traumas, the cracks in our armor. We tell ourselves that other people wouldn’t understand all that, so we opt instead to just present yet another talent of ours to keep them around. No wonder we can’t separate our value from our output.
If I accomplish only one thing with my life, I hope it is that I project the truth of every person I encounter back onto them.
When you wake up and forget how much beauty is in the world. When it takes all your moxie and guts to get out from under the covers. When you forget to eat for days and lay in your bed. When you look in the mirror and see your pudgy thighs, the vitamins you take every morning, the anxiety medicine on your desk. When you can’t breathe because even the air feels virtual at times and you can’t fucking think straight because you haven’t felt another person’s hands in weeks. When did hugs become so dangerous? Remember this.
To be completely known and completely loved is humanity’s universal need. We can’t escape that truth. Try as we might to hide it, we want people to know us. We want to offer our hurts, our joys, our regrets, our triumphs, our childhood wounds, our unhealthy coping mechanisms, say “this is all of me,” and feel embraced. We want others to be a safe space for us, and we want to safely carry them in return.
If I accomplish only one thing with my life, I hope it is that I project the truth of every person I encounter back onto them. I hope that whenever a person walks away from me, they leave knowing that they are loved. They are adored. They are priceless. They are an essential character in the epic narrative of the universe. That goes for everyone reading this, too.
Let 2020 be the year we said “screw it” and bared it all to each other. The time we stopped hurting in private and started demanding better from each other. The time when actionable love was on full display in our country. In our world. The time we stopped trying to quantify and monitor and measure how we were feeling and just felt. The time we all started writing our whole stories.
