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THE POWER OF BEING DIFFERENT: This I Believe
Being different can have an advantage. When I was a kid, my mother always reminded my siblings and me that we were smart. Someone would tell her, including me,” Well, that is your child. “You gave birth to her and have no choice but to see the beauty in her. Right? Well, the truth is, I believed her; I thought I was smart, too, until years ago, when I came to the U.S., I started questioning whether I should trust myself or my mother’s words of affirmation. Quite a few incidents made me feel the opposite of what I thought I was and what my mother used to tell me. One of them was on my first day of school. I was so excited to start school in a different setting than where I came from. Still, after only a few minutes of getting to school, my excitement started to wear off when I overheard a teacher talking to another one, questioning her about why I was put in the class I was in. I can remember that day as if it was yesterday; she said, talking about me:” I don’t think she has the same level as a kid in the 4th grade.” I felt crushed and slightly reassured when the other teacher responded, " We can test her again in a few months to ensure she is on the right level and in the right class. I just came from South Africa and have met several smart immigrant kids before." That teacher was not the only one who thought that since I couldn’t speak English, I wasn’t that smart; some of my classmates acted that way until I proved them wrong by getting good grades on a given test. Some of my classmates would even manifest discontent when I was in the same group for a group project. They were comfortable with me toward the end of the school year after realizing I was getting good grades.
Another incident was on my first day of work. One of the workers said to the manager, not knowing I was standing close by:” How did you hire someone that can’t speak English…How is she going to work if she can’t even speak?” These experiences are not the last for me; I have had a few more when I felt I was being treated differently because I was different. Those experiences taught me that being different is not always about skin color or gender; it is about standing out for whatever reason: being short, being fat, being skinny, and so on. In my case, it is “not being able to speak good English” or having an accent.
Janina Kugel, a chief Human Resources officer and member of the managing board of Siemens, said one day, “Being different leads to being able to look beyond the obvious.” I agree with her. As she said, when you are different, you are often an outsider at first; you see things that many others don’t. Most people always look at the obvious. When looking at me or listening to me talking, people were looking at the obvious. For my classmates or my teacher, it took them a few months of me doing my homework and assignments and getting good grades to recognize or realize that even though I could not speak like others, I deserved to be where I was, on the same level as my classmates which is 11th grade. One day, we had an essay, and after reading what I wrote, my teacher looked at me, surprised; she said:” Are you the one who wrote this? You wrote well, better than some students who speak good English.” She said those words to me not as a compliment but because she did not expect that from me. At my place of work, it took them months to realize that despite being unable to speak like others, I was a good worker.
Even though those moments of exclusion were painful and made me doubt myself and my abilities, they are priceless. They made me who I am. They taught me that being different means learning to relate or adapt to others without changing who you are. Being different is fighting harder to become a group member, be accepted, and be a part of a community. Losing the power to be different is losing the privilege to be free. Being free is not wanting to speak differently as I do; it is using the inner human power to look beyond the obvious and to make a difference. As one would say: “Dare to be different, for only then will you make a difference.” Being different does not make me a victim.
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