Everything makes sense until it doesn’t

What color best defines you? 

I’ll go first.

Mine’s blue. It’s a color I associate closely with the things I love and that make me happy. When I think of blue, I think of the time I surfed in the middle of North Africa, I think of chaos in the OR. I think of the open heart surgery that made me fall in love with medicine all over again and oversized scrubs that I wish fit me better. But maybe, when you think of blue, you might not share the same perspective. It may connote gloomy, sadness or remind you of the last time you spent your tears on someone or something. It may remind you of a melancholic playlist or may bring back your best or worst memory. 

Let’s try that again.

Red to some is the color of love. They see beauty in it. They see happiness within it. They see a color to be romanticized. But some may see blood, rage, aggressions or even pain. A color that may have brought about hurt or even lust. In Africa, red symbolizes death and grief but In China, red embodies prosperity and great fortune. In Hinduism, we wear white to funerals as a symbol of mourning and purity. But in Catholicism, we wear black to a funeral as a sign of respect to honor the deceased but wear white to a wedding to symbolize purity. 

What love is to you is trauma to someone. What happiness is to you is grief to someone. What belief is to you could be the cause of someone’s distrust. What hope is to you is an illusion for someone. A fable for you is someone else’s reality. A norm for you is a luxury for someone. It doesn’t make either perspective immoral or invalid, it just happens to make us who we are as people. And that’s okay. That stems from our relationship with familiarity, but also the experience that at some point broke it. Why is it that over time people excel at their jobs? Why is it that we tend to fall in love with the things that we have mastered? Why is it that all of a sudden you enjoyed solving equations in calculus? Because at some point everything made sense when you plugged in the right formula. And if solved every single day, the concept is now a norm that won’t need to be debated over. That’s our relationship with familiarity. It is human nature to find comfort within the things you have mastered at some point or grown up with, to not want to try something new when things already seem to be working out, to be comfortable with a set routine. Comfortable being- stagnant. But what happens when you're faced with a newly formulated equation, one that wasn't in the least bit identical or that matched up to the level of difficulty you were used to? All of a sudden you can’t navigate anything. It’s gone. Every sense of familiarity you held onto is long gone. The panic sets in, you're in denial. You didn’t sign up for this. It hits you out of nowhere - a surprise. You're angry. You ask yourself as to why you’re solving an equation that was never touched upon in lecture, or written in your notes. You’ve now entered the realm of bargaining.You look at your paper. You convince yourself that maybe you could fake it till you make it. Maybe you could get partial credit. But soon that optimism transforms into pessimism. You spiral and along with it so does your motivation, effort, and hope. And that’s all it takes for you to dislike math again- the experience that broke the familiarity you once held onto.

This isn't about math but a concept that works just like it: Avenues of approaches that lead to a singular answer. 

Some may have experienced a level that’s beyond our scope of practice that allows them to solve an equation in a matter of minutes. That same equation could take someone else hours to work through. It doesn’t tell us that one is competent over the other. It tells us that both cope differently and utilize methods that the other has never been acquainted with. You learn from each other. You bring about perspective in each other. That’s what you aim for. What you believed in five years ago is probably a humbling moment you live by today. And maybe what you live by today is a result of the belief you instilled five years ago. Both influential, yet one molded by familiarity and the other repurposed with what was once known to be familiarity.

What is black for someone else can be white for you. What is white for you, can be black for someone else. I’m not telling you to start seeing gray or adapt or master the latter. I am telling you to simply acknowledge that there is a story behind both, one that has not been told but written through an anthology of words that echoes from the page.