Select All That Apply

Recently I started down a rabbit hole of LinkedIn jobs. I completed a few applications (I know, I know... maybe this is my first mistake), and this brought up a familiar feeling that I luckily haven't experienced in awhile: box-checking-induced anxiety.

I am both Black and Chinese ??. I can't select just one or the other without feeling like I'm ignoring integral parts of myself. But "two or more races" feels clunky, and leaves room for incorrect assumption that one of those races might be one that I am not (?). While I made a mental note that most applications now seem to offer this "two or more" option (this wasn't the case in earlier application-filling phases of my life), I felt a new sort of inadequacy about it. I found one application that instead prompted to "select all that apply," and marked my two boxes peacefully - I much prefer this.

This little episode reminded me of a conversation about the unsung benefits of holding/fusing/being two concepts at once, a dynamic that has been an ongoing struggle, theme, and lately a feature of my life. Maybe you too are mixed, or a third culture kid, or you're raising mixed or third culture kids, or you're gender non-conforming, trans, politically mixed, professionally interdisciplinary, or using prefixes like bi- / inter- / multi- / poly- to describe yourself. Maybe, all of the above. If any of that applies, then file this Friday Five away under "affirmations."

Here's an excerpt from of one my MBA admissions essays: "In the 90's other kids would always ask which race I identified with more, like choosing sides in an argument.?I felt uncomfortable with this because I really didn't feel I was 100% a part of either "side", a notion that in turn cultivated a hypersensitivity to the thoughts, challenges, and motivations of both parents and both cultural groups.?It wasn't until I entered the work force that I realized how that hypersensitivity could serve my ability to observe and extract insights.?While I was in undergraduate college I worked for Bear Stearns and felt like a cultural anthropologist trying to fit into a plain-dealing finance world." While I was conscientious and well-regarded, it took a few career pivots for me to learn how to apply my intersectional sensibilities in an environment driven by one-sidedness, conviction, and certainty. I grew up believing that being part one thing and part another thing meant I would never feel whole, but as I gained more experience I began to recognize that the North star in most endeavors is to somehow make 1 + 1 = 3. And in that mission, I come alive. Something definitely clicked for me when I stopped referring to myself as a set of fractions.

I was grateful to stumble upon the following paragraph in Hitendra Wadhwa's (one of my favorite instructors) recent book Inner Mastery, Outer Impact: "We have been brought up in a world of binary logic. If something is true, its opposite must also be false. Yet scientists in the twentieth century discovered that this was too limiting a framework. Mathematicians developed new forms of logic where statement A and its opposite, not-A, could both be true, and quantum physicists posited that electrons were both waves and particles. In formulating our beliefs, we, too, can benefit from fusing opposing ideas to arrive at higher, more integrative truths. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.'"

That "still retain the ability to function" part is hard. For much of my life, I envied other people's seemingly effortless certainty. There are very few situations where I feel my identity go on autopilot mode -- rather, it feels like I am constantly crafting it. This used to make me feel slower than my peers (akin to having an online profile autofill your responses vs. pausing to think and enter your response every time) and that slowness somehow translated to a self-perceived deficiency that I am very much still working to shed. But where I lack in the comfort of (normative) compulsory culture, I've been fortunate to have been presented many more choices. I've dealt with micro aggressions, sure, but my brain also has a lot of practice making micro choices. Apparently, this ability to make rapid, microdecisions in the background is a function of social emotional learning. To exist in between, is to constantly be gaining repetitions making your own choices and listening to different parts of yourself simultaneously. It's also more freeing, more fun. Brooklyn-based photographer Quil Lemons offered this perspective, which summed it up nicely: "I feel like masculinity is sort of a prison. You can be masculine and gay, or feminine and straight. Now we have more space to play."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi also researched this topic for the book CREATIVITY: FLOW AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISCOVERY AND INVENTION: “Creative individuals to a certain extent escape rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers... A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles their repertoire of responses and can interact with the world in terms of a much richer and varied spectrum of opportunities.” But this idea obviously extends beyond race and gender, into many more areas for people to hold simultaneous space for opposing forces. Another example, from CREATIVITY: “Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion. Usually each of us tends to be one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. In fact, in current psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to express both traits at the same time.”

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So perhaps this skill of rejecting either/or in favor of both/and, should be researched, favored, leveraged more in a leadership sense. Perhaps especially in this melting pot experiment of a country, these in-between people are positioned well to lead with an ultimate kind of nuanced, supportive, holistic love. Baratunde Thurston found a thread for me here, in discussing AMERICA OUTDOORS on Larry Wilmore's podcast recently: "I used to perform in my relationships, thinking that that was the key to love... And I think that a lot of Americans are performing love for their country, in the shallow sense of only seeing the good parts. Thinking that this commitment to only see the positive, is patriotism. It is not. In an interpersonal comparison, if I'm loving you, just for the good things you do, and even more for the good feelings you give me, I'm using you. I'm not actually loving you. So in relationships, you've got to see the bad parts. You've got to see the shadow, and acknowledge that, otherwise you don't even know the person you say you love. And that's true for countries too." It's starting to feel as though this resting state of uncertainty between two ideals, is really a kind of superpower. I treasure this space in between, and hopefully you do too. Maybe our country needs more 'tweeners. Ok, I'll stop there :)