I Wish Someone Told Me I Wasn’t Different From

I completed Level I and II in 2016 and joined EPCC’s vital mission in 2019 on the training and workshop committee and then the planning and development committee.

I’ve enjoyed the personal benefits of EP- CC’s peace education as I’ve continued my journey of self discovery through personal exploration of my perspectives and beliefs.

Last month I felt emotionally ready for a new area of exploration and chose to look at my body consciousness and body image issues with my therapist.

I was now calling up memories of my childhood as a young ballet dancer; feeling the sadness, frustration, fear, and self doubt that came from looking at the other little girls, comparing my body with theirs, and meas- uring myself as not good enough. I was not looking at my dancing skill or talent. I was proud of that. I was comparing my body to the other girls and finding that I didn’t fit in.

Unfortunately, the “adult in the room,” instead of affirming my talent and the value of diversity, reinforced my hunch that I was not good enough by telling me that I did not have the body type required to be a balle- rina. I was 9 years old.

Being in that memory was painful, however I am an adult now. I can now give love to that little girl while also realizing that I am not that little girl anymore. I can understand why she believed that she was not good enough. I can also use my adult brain to understand that she absolutely was perfectly who she was sup- posed to be.

But I got an even bigger gift that I want to share with you today. I know, through my study of child and human development, that the driving, underlying need of the human psyche is the need to belong. This makes so much sense when I think about early humans and the impossibility of survival of one human alone.

In my therapy session, I repeated out loud something I’ve heard and told myself a hundred times “The other girls were probably feeling not good enough for some other reason.”

But I heard this next piece for the first time.

I was not Different From the other girls I was Different Like the other girls. In fact I was Different Like every other human ever created.

It is the human condition to worry that we are Different From everyone else and to judge ourselves better or worse than our fellows; that we might be set aside, cast out, or oth- erwise alone, that we are in danger, like our early human ancestor would have been if they were left alone in the elements.

How I wish there was an adult in the room when I was 9 to tell me that I was not danger- ously Different From everyone else but that I was beautifully Different just Like everyone else.

And this is why I choose to spend my valu- able time working with EPCC. This is the work we are doing, and not one child at a time, but by educating the educators who are “in the room” with our children all over the nation.

When we value our human diversity in front of our children we don’t just talk into the wind, or put a drop in the bucket for an anti-bias/ anti-racist future. We give the world the gift of a generation that believes at their core that their differences are exactly perfect, and so are everyone else's. We are not Different From others, we are Different Like others, and that is the beauty of being human and the strength of humanity.