multitudes
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
—Walt Whitman
Buried in the debris of my Gmail inbox, hibernating like seeds in winter, lay some-odd applications you’ve sent me. For this job and that internship, for such submission and so-and-so extracurricular. Each application has been given a glance-through, the email joining thirty others in the starred folder, and the reminder to fill it out within the next one to three business weeks has been scrawled in some margin of some notebook. Deadlines and due dates busy my calendar apps. Documents of unanswered, copy-pasted interview questions collect dust in the recesses of my Google drive. I click through them, tab after tab of excruciating questions, asking me to describe myself and share an experience that I learned from and show my leadership abilities. Moved to frustrated tears, I close my laptop.
Sure, your formulaic questions, crafted by some organizational psychologist deep within the recesses of your payroll, don’t seem too bad on the surface. You want an understanding of the faces and backstories behind the transcripts and cover letters. You want to determine if we’re compatible with each other—as college and prospective student, as employer and potential employee—so neither of us wastes our time. You want to divine my strengths and weaknesses, my morals and values, to see if I can fit within your culture and offer you something worthwhile. You want to know all about me, but as soon as I tell you, your interest in me vaporizes like cities amid nuclear winter. I wouldn’t hold any of the automated rejection letters against you—I know I’m flawed, inexperienced, imperfect—if I hadn’t realized the pattern in who you reject and who you accept. You reject people who share themselves and their stories with you, calling them hypocritical, aimless, scattered, extreme. You accept people who cobble half-truths and satisfying narratives out of imitations of human experiences: people who simplify and dumb their lives down enough to seem simple, easy to deal with, easy to understand; people who paint themselves as one-dimensional caricatures instead of admitting their full, complex humanity.
Now, your standard for all applicants is that we present as something slightly less than human—perhaps as a character from a picture book, with a linear narrative, a few personality traits, and a simple goal. You shorten word limits and interview durations. You send rejection letters and apologetic emails to everyone who can’t precipitate themselves down into a satisfying soundbite or a brief bulleted list, as if you yourself have no inkling of the richness, incompleteness, and endlessness inherent in living a human life. To juice someone down to the pulp, to strip them of everything too complicated to comprehend in a 20-second skim-through… how dare you?
How inhuman, to demand that I explain my world in a “short essay” or “three descriptive words”. Would you task an artist with painting a sunset and only give her red paint and a broad brush? She might get across the main concept, but the forgotten intricacies of the forests at the shoreline and the cliffs hugging the margins, the gold and the purple badly needed and sorely missed, would compromise her. To judge her based on artificial limits you’ve ordained—not because you didn’t have other paints and brushes, but merely to increase efficiency by a second or two—does it showcase her true artistic abilities? Or does it force her to bend over backward, sacrificing displaying her true strengths and weaknesses in a mad attempt to make something despite your constraints? Will you fault her when you learn more about her skills—such as her struggle with color theory—even though you disincentivized, no, forbade her from informing you in the first place?
“Tell me about yourself”—a cross-section of my life can’t fit into a Google form. Nothing meaningful is gleaned from scraping the surface of a geode. In a short paragraph, I must lay bare not only my marketable skills but my ancestors; my childhood; my plans, ambitions, follies, worries; the experiences and people that live deeper within me than the calcium in my bones; the stretch of my tendrils across highways and pebbled paths to golden cities and urban snowscapes. How do I tell where I end and someone else begins? I’ve sent pieces of me across oceans in the arms of loved ones, sealed shards of me into envelopes and pressed them like dried flowers into international calls. And I’ve accumulated quite the collection of others’ parts, incorporated them into myself: I’m a thousand pieces from a thousand ceramic bowls, glued together into something new. And you seethe when the colors clash, when the picture-book simplicity you demand from my life proves to be an oversimplification?
Is being full of asterisks and contradictions such a crime? I tell people that I don’t listen to rap—except for the albums and songs shown to me by friends and former crushes. My biggest passion lies in the hard sciences—but in the soft ones too, courtesy of middle-school teachers; and it burns just as bright for the humanities, the product of each book I’ve devoured and each writer I’ve loved. I dye my hair to feel more like the person I want to be, yet I treasure my roots growing out because my natural color is a part of that fantasy, too. I’m irritable around and exhausted by other people, yet I need my long list of loved ones close to soften life’s jagged edges. I use many names, many pronouns, many labels—none of which mesh cohesively in any eyes but my own. I want to be an educator and a world-changer and a philanthropic millionaire, and I want no one to know my name besides the mushrooms in the forest. I’ve never agreed with myself once. Can you look in my eyes and profess you’re free from hypocrisy? Are you, too, not an eyesore of a ceramic bowl, an ugly quit made of parts that don’t make sense to anyone but yourself? You don’t get to expect monochromatic simplicity from someone’s life and enrage over their nuances and subtexts while refusing to acknowledge your own clashing patterns.
Soon, I will fill out those applications with red paint and a broad brush. I’ll show off shards from my bowl that complement each other—perhaps a glossy white one, a light pink one, and one with big roses and swirling vines. You’ll smile at the cohesion, at how simple and understandable of a human being I am. And you’ll be shocked when you see me with a shard I previously didn’t show you—perhaps a marbled one acting as a necklace pendant, or a sunny yellow one poking out of my pocket, as if you don’t have a million concealed shards of your own.
You know I’m lying to you. You know we both contain multitudes, worlds crashing into incompatible inner worlds, not a fraction of which can be reduced to 250 words about yourself. So cut the shit, why don’t you?
