What’s the one thing for which you’re more willing to die than lose?
For you, it’s a place. Or a person. Or a mentality. It’s your DNA, your thing. Your number one. It is yours and only yours. These things, they are your expression.
A nose ring, a tattoo, a style—self-expressive, sure. But before you can enable the expression, you have to define what the self is.
We are a compilation of words and statistics and truths and white lies that have tied together our point A to our point Z, making specific, sometimes calculated, sometimes sporadic stops at points B through Y along the way. As similar as you can be to me, and me to them, and him to her, we are our own stories.
We decide the things that we want to call our own and the things that make us up. New Jersey is part of me, its sand and waves and surf. I am made of Portland, steel bridges and microbreweries. Duke is part of me, the papers and the projects and the practices. These make up my self.
Self-expression is a matter of ebbs and flows. We wax and wane with pompous pride or quiet complacency, making calculated choices as to when we want to blend in or stand out. Our surroundings define us and we define our surroundings, deciding where to go and who to be. Today is a matter of where we’re at, but, more than that, it’s a matter of how we got here.
It is up to us to determine when we identify with certain things or places or people. We decide when we defend and we decide when we deceit. We choose to identify ourselves as people of a certain place, and we select where to position our defenses in an a la carte methodology.
I feel a certain connectedness and pride in the places I’ve been, places I’ve lived, things I have seen. Other times, I feel a disgust for—a disgrace in—the things I’ve been conditioned to hate, and, almost always, the things I dislike are the ones that violate the people, places and mentalities I have become the most proud of.
I am made of my father’s stern character and his kind and sensitive heart that was hidden behind police badges and ribbons and perfectly polished boots gathered in his tenure as a lieutenant. I am made of my mother’s grace and humor and steadiness. I am made of my brother’s Buddhist-like mentality, and the propensity to wear my heart on my sleeve. These are my pieces. These are my characters. These are my points A through Z, and that alphabet of anecdote and truths and faults will be longer by this afternoon.
Last week, I flew from RDU to Newark Airport, clad in Duke black and blue Nike apparel as my team and I took to our first away opponents of the season. We loaded the bus on East Campus as the North Carolina sun rose, packed our bags in thick, humid heat and rolled toward the United Airlines terminal in pursuit of a few road wins in the name of Duke University.
In our hotel in Somerset, N.J., a middle-aged man held the elevator for me as I headed downstairs before a pre-game meeting. “Field hockey?” he asked me, and I pulled my headphones away from my ears as I affirmed. “Oh. That sucks. That’s gotta be like watching paint dry.”
And I thought, what a complete a**hole.
These moments are the ones where your pride gets tested, and these are the times when you realize where your pride is.
Life—specifically this time in life—is a quickly shifting binary. It is kind and it is cruel. I create lofty, beautiful dreams of grandeur and abounding success, and I have them halted hastily by reality. I sometimes count myself out of things and am astounded when they pan out in my favor. I feel spread thin across a multitude of outlets—spun toward madness—and am soon reminded how fortunate and fair my life is. All of these things—these trials and failures and faults and rich experiences—they are my pride.
There are few things we are more passionate about than those people, those places and those personality quirks that make us, us. They are richer than our job experience. They are more important than our resume highlights. They are grander than GPA and major choices and references. They are the things that we can—and must—leverage the most to get us anywhere we’re trying to go. They are our pride, and if we don’t keep that in mind, our business suits, portfolios and pencil skirts will not be enough to make us happy. Take pride in your A to Z and your DNA, since they’re all you’ve got figured out.
As I sit writing this, typing and backspacing, editing, finding synonyms and trading sips of Diet Coke and black coffee, the dawdling pace of content creation and expression reminds me how little I’ve got figured out. I wrestle between words, grappling ideas and attempting to pin down the perfect alliterative statements—the ideal frame for my expansive and disjointed thoughts. I don’t have things figured out, but what I have realized is that if you’ve got pride in what you are, things will work themselves out.
And until the sand turns to glass, I will forever be prideful in how I have so haphazardly figured it all out. Until tomorrow, that is.
Ashley Camano is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday. Send Ashley a message on Twitter @camanyooo.
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