Sunday, July 30, 2017

More to the Story

  

     I love watching TED talks. Well, I guess maybe I love watching them if they're about a topic that interests me. There's something about listening to people speak intelligently about subjects they know a lot about that I find fascinating. A few days ago in a session here at training we watched a TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie, a novelist. She talked about how whenever she is introduced, there is a single story that accompanies the introduction of where she is from.
     A single story happens when a person or group of people becomes known for a single trait or action, usually because that is how they repeatedly get talked about. It is what happens when we let ourselves generalize and talk about "those people", as if every individual in a group is a clone of the other people in the group. It is what happens when we get a bad first impression of someone, and become convinced that the negative things we saw in that person are the only parts of them. It happens when every time we see an African child on T.V., they are emaciated and crying. After that being the picture I saw for most of my childhood, you can imagine what it was like to arrive in Togo to find many children laughing, playing, and singing.
     As a person who was born with something called a neural tube defect, in my case Spina Bifida, and as a person who is noticeably different than most people simply because of the way I walk, Adichie's talk resonated with me because I also do not want to be known for one part of my life that I have no control over.
     In a few days, I hope to become a commissioned missionary. I know that to some people, I will be the girl who listened to God's call, even though she was born with this pitiful affliction. Bless her heart. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but it is a story I have been told about myself throughout my life on many occasions, whether it was intentional or not. I know that it comes from a good place, most of the time, so I try to appreciate it. But I also don't want to be known only as the girl with the disability who did things despite her pitiful affliction, bless her heart.
     Yes, I was born with a "thing" that sets me apart in some ways from the general population, and yes I will become a missionary. But that is far from the only part of my story, and I do not want it to become my single story. Yes, the fact that a disability is part of my life did help me learn to notice people who aren't being included, and it helped me relate to people who feel different or left out, which is an asset for someone in the mission field. But other than that, I really don't feel those two parts of my life are dependent on each other. I fully believe God has a plan for each of our lives and I don't want to speculate too much about what my life would be like if certain things were different. I just think that these are important parts of me who make me who I am, but they are not always directly related, nor are they anywhere close to being the whole story of who I am.
     Please know that I try to gracefully accept every compliment that is given to me, and I know that people who see me as an over-comer of my disability are just as full of love and good intentions as those who feel no need to mention it. There are plenty of things in my life that would have been much easier if I was an "able bodied" person, and perhaps I should acknowledge that more often. It's just never been what I want to be known for.
     I know that I cannot control what story gets told about me, perhaps that is why I find it so important to tell my own story as much as possible. And yes, I need to learn to be graceful no matter someone else interprets my life. But as I set out on the next chapter of my life, serving as a Global Mission Fellow in Nome, Alaska, it is my goal to remember that each person I meet does not have just one single story, but many stories that intertwine together to make them who they are. That's the way God made us, complex and diverse, and I think that is something worth honoring.















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