Being raised American, I was taught, again and again, that we’re all unique—like a fluttering snowflake or the fingerprints we have. In our culture, we’re encouraged to embrace, nurture our uniqueness. Well I’m here to tell you: it’s not always so great.
Observe! (with a sweeping hand, like one of The Price Is Right models) :
1) I’m an atheist: in the United States, that means I’m unlike 95% of the entire population. Within my greater family, which has 37 first cousins alone on my mother’s side of the family (that’s not counting those second and third cousins I keep meeting, everytime I go back), and over 30 aunties and uncles, I’m the only non-believer.
2) Within my big family, I’m probably the only one who has ever given vegetarianism a serious run (say, longer than, oh, an hour or a week).
3) I cannot roll my tongue, like an estimated 19-35% of the population. Additionally, I was born with what’s referred to informally as a “pigeon chest”, or Pectus carinatum, which, again, is an anomaly within the population.
4) Besides my primas Lita and Lourdes who live in Europe, I may be the only person within my family who has ever traveled to four continents.
5) And now, at the tender age of 29, I may very well be the first in my entire family to have what’s called a CT-guided needle aspiration of a "lesion" just off my right lung—which basically means that I’m going under a CAT Scan (which is short for Computerized Axial Tomography) in order to have a big needle plunged in and out of my chest to extract a sample for biopsy. In a family with no history of cancer, I maybe the first—at such a young age—to have some form of lymphoma.
Being “unique” isn’t so nifty right now.
Monday, March 2, 2009
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