I am sitting at an ice cream shop with my friends when a group of college girls come in. They’re all wearing the same neon and bolded white lettered shirts, the same half-up, half-down hairdo, the same pair of white converse, and they all carry an air of adolescent eloquence that inspires the hearts of anyone and everyone around them to understand the meaning of “cool.” My friends around me automatically tell me that they hate these girls, that there is nothing original about them, and I get caught in it too.

As we eat whatever frozen pastry we hold in our hands, we try to figure out why these group of girls are so uniform in everything they do, we try to understand why it’s culturally trendy to dress a certain way, carry yourself a certain way, and be a certain way. Then as our conversation further unravels, we pick apart the flaws in why the lack of authenticity is a problem in our generation. There’s a debate as to whether this change is due to the increasing usage of social media, whether it’s due to this, or to that. We're desperately trying to understand why they were this way. Suddenly, it was in that moment I saw that we weren’t any better than the group of girls across from us.

Here we were, picking out every single flaw and basking in the momentary superiority we felt towards them. We subconsciously put ourselves on this pedestal just because there’s security in thinking that you might be better than someone else. There’s security in pointing out someone’s problems and not your own.

When we meet people for the first time, it’s easy to look at them like a fact sheet. We look at what they’re wearing, we figure out what personality they have, we notice these external sharp edges and we forget that humans are not objects that are meant to be debunked, figured out, or understood. We forget that people have stories too; your neighbor, your project partner, the woman who works at your favorite restaurant are all made up of entirely complex prologues, chapters, and epilogues, that you didn’t take a chance and read because you felt that there wasn’t a need to step over that artificially drawn line of what is accepted and what’s not. When we are quick to judge, that’s when the seed of vulnerability and insecurity is shaken within us.

It’s hard to let go of the predispositions we think of when we see people who are different from us. Instead, we put up walls as checkpoints. We try to understand who and what these people are so we know how we can compare to them, without getting to really know what their story is. It’s how we protect ourselves. It takes a lot to be real and it takes a lot to confine yourself outside the walls of self-proclamation. It takes a lot to take the finger that you’re pointing and point it at yourself. Don’t put others down for doing something when we (yes, you and me) all wish to look a certain way, to be seen a certain way, and to sound a certain way.

So let’s do it together, let’s see each other as intricate stories instead of external edges. Let’s lower our pedestals and look at someone and not above them, then we will start to understand the human capability to love and accept.