Same Difference

So everyone always talks about how people are all the same. How we all feel hurt and love and sadness and hope and this human condition is what makes us all humanity and how we are all sinners and all in need of love. But I think that's a lie. I mean, it's true we all feel emotions and we've given those similar names, but I don't think we are at all the same. I think we are so massively different our difference could stun a team of oxen in its tracks. Our differences are as wide as oceans and our disagreements are as deep as canyons.

I remember these self-esteem classes they had at my elementary school (one of 3 elementary schools I went to) and they talked about our feelings and how we all have the same feelings and they were constantly telling us how special we were. I remember how special they told me I was because at the end of the "course" we got a certificate with a teddy bear and a heart on it that had our name in big letters and it said, "I'm Very Special". I've kept it all these years in case one day I forget that I'm special. And that certificate comes to mind for me a lot, probably because I've never met anyone other than the kids in that class who has a certificate confirming their specialness or who would remember if they'd received a certificate like that. But I think about it all the time. And in defense of my claim that we are incredibly different from each other, that we might possibly never have another thought similar to another person, I think of this certificate and how absolutely no one I know could produce from a box of grade school archives a certificate proving their specialness. I think of a friend of mine who has brothers and how her entire life she grew up knowing that her family was safe and intact, and I never thought that. It wasn't perfect for her, nothing ever is, but she never wondered if her mom and dad would come home at the end of the day. They were committed and she never wondered if one day they might get tired of the struggle and give up. The only act of building that ever happened in my family of origin was my father remarrying and even that I doubted would last, although it has. All other actions were toward entropy, the moving apart of particles whose chemistry just wouldn't resolve together even by force. And I think of our difference in how I can read someone's supposed heart on a page and think, I have no idea how someone can think that. I don't speak their language. I don't speak their heart. And I wonder in fear sometimes when this happens if everyone else can see their meaning, that possibly everyone else speaks one language that I never learned. I don't truly fear not knowing the code, because I know my own codes and my life is extraordinary because of it. I have had extraordinary love and extraordinary loss, and for all the days I wish for a serving of ordinariness, I choose my life.

I choose its awkwardness, its anxiety and its pain over any inkling toward sinking down in a hole of mediocrity. I choose fierce grace over meddling judgmental pinpricks. I choose the freedom to be myself and know my own weaknesses. I choose having the freedom to examine myself and find myself acceptable without anyone else's input.

All I have to do to confirm for myself that we are so vastly different is walk into a bookstore. Where on one side of the aisle, I see Billy Graham books and on the other is Nostradamus's guide to the apocalypse. Every single moment in each person's life shapes them into a specific being. A specific mixture of good and evil, hope and despair, music and light, fatness and thinness, thoughtfulness and superficiality, richness and poverty, truth and lies, authenticating and falsifying gestures of self. (Kevin would call this presenting masks or our real selves.)

Gestures of self. Those gestures that are symbols of our selves that we offer to others to accept. The drive to be known and remain a mystery keeps us constantly moving and shifting our identities and choices and affiliations and preferences so even the specific things that would keep us canyons away from others are continually changing. And for others, their specific assortment of identities is a concoction that can scarcely be nailed down. Yes, oh yes we are different. We are not the same. We are not all blessed with intelligence, nor all with talent or charisma or athelticism or skill or charm. Some of us have ideas and some of us don't. Some of us strive and some rest. We go along with the crowd, but he or she thinks outside the norms. They keep their heads down and plink along in life, but I must ponder the whys of every action. Our group must find a reason and for others the common reason is enough.

We are not the same. The only thing that is even remotely the same is that we all have noses, and even that is not categorically true. We are different. We are far, far away from each other in thought, word and deed. Our plans are a vast myriad and our dreams are an ocean of options.

We are individual creations and individual minds. We are identities being molded more to the likeness of Christ and souls being shaped to our own specific blueprint. We are only the same in our uniqueness.