Lutalica

You tell the world who you are in a million different ways. Some are subtle; some are not. A twang in your voice, a tattoo on your shoulder, a spring in your step, or a hole in your shoe. But somehow it doesn’t seem to matter: this world has already got you pegged.

Soon after you were born, you were put in a little box with a label slapped on it. It was nothing personal—and that was kind of the point. It was an easy way to keep things organized, so people could size you up at a glance and didn’t have to think about what was inside. Gradually you learned to make yourself comfortable, positioning yourself in relation to the expectations of others, subverting or reinforcing them as you will. You tried packaging and repackaging your identity in different combinations, until you began to feel like you belong, and could wear your labels proudly.

But there’s a part of you that never found a home, rattling around in categories that never really did you justice. You look around at other people, trying to judge how loosely they fit in their own lives, sensing a knot of confusion hidden beneath a name tag. And you realize we’re still only strangers, though we already think we know what the other is going to say. As if the only thing left to talk about is who belongs in what category, and which labels are right or wrong.

It’s an open question why we sort ourselves into categories. Maybe it’s the only way to stay sane in a society full of strangers, so you don’t have to wade through a thicket of individuals just to pay for your groceries. We put people in boxes to get on with our day, to feel connected with each other, or feel like we’re a part of something, because we’re afraid that if there was nothing to contain us, we’d melt into the air.

You can’t help but wonder what would happen if these boxes began falling apart. If each of us took the time to write our identities by hand, speaking only for ourselves, in our own words. Taking our chances out in the open, meeting each other as we are, in all our wholeness and strangeness. Finally gathering the courage to ask, “What is it like being you?”—while being brave enough to admit that we don’t already know the answer.

Maybe it’ll mean that we’ve finally arrived, unpacking the boxes to make ourselves at home. Maybe someday our grandchildren will listen to our stories of how we treated each other back in the day, and they’ll struggle to believe it even happened in the first place. How could we manage to live in the same house for so long but never stop to introduce ourselves?