There’s an English saying about your “lot” in life, and the “cards you’ve been dealt” - as if these beginning labels and statuses are what define you for the remainder of your time on Earth. This hierarchy exists in most cultures, where the socioeconomic status of your parents, if you are lucky enough to have any or ones that care, and factors out of your control appear to predetermine who you get to be.
People told me all the time how I would never amount to anything, simply based on a label:
That poor people like us have no place except as homeless, janitors, and second-class citizens.
That women have no future unless we marry a wealthy man - certainly because we lack logic, and advanced reasoning and intellectual or technical capabilities. We are too “emotional” to do any of these things, of course.
That immigrants like me could never fit in and earn a living. Asian women are supposed to be submissive and have funny accents, after all.
The list goes on.
For all of you that have struggled through something, this series of sketches is for you. To encourage you to dream beyond the labels that others enforce on you, and to say, we can’t internalize the things that society tells us.
Constructive feedback, yes, but we should not blindly accept what others say and translate that to a harsh inner critic. As women and minorities, I think we often do this.
When we believe their words wholeheartedly, that’s when we give up our will to make (yes, a play on words). I know it is tempting to want to listen to everything - after all, they have credentials (oh he’s had 10 successful exits), or they say they have our best interest in mind (“Trust me, you’ll be better off if you do X”), and they have an air of authority and confidence that tells us this is what you should do and who you are. And we want to believe them because we want nothing more than to fit in, to be part of the human connection and fabric.
What I learned later on in life, though, is these words usually stem from insecurity or fear that the other person has because they recognize something in you that has potential, and instead of introspection or therapy to do the hard work to address that internal turmoil, they would rather put others down than help them move beyond the box.
So, let’s be resilient, and dream.
Nobody can take that away from us.
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