By Yamila García

“The different” always caught my attention. For as long as I can remember, I have always been drawn to the unconventional. I was different in many ways and if there was something I hadn’t noticed yet, people would point it out to me. I don’t know when being different became my emblem and from then on, I would always be on the side of what others rejected. It was a way to protect myself, to show that I chose to be different and that I didn’t care about fitting in. Of course, I didn’t choose it, it was how I was born, but that was my way of surviving life in a society that I didn’t understand at all. And on that path of making what was different my own, I learned a lot. I was filled with different points of view, I learned how others see life, and how others feel. I was surprised to see how people that others judged as weird had great abilities, wonderful personalities, and totally different ways of functioning. That’s how I realized that being different was not bad at all… I valued and embraced my differences and those of others. After all, what can we learn from someone who thinks and works just like us? There is no learning there.

We learn from the one who thinks differently, from the one who presents us with a look that we would not have thought of, we learn from the one who does things differently, be it because of his thought structure, his culture, or his personal history. The advances that we have seen in the history of the world have not arisen from the common and ordinary, but from those who dared to get out of the typical structures. Those who dared to do or think differently even if society required them to “fit in.” I think the best goal we can have as a society is to stop trying to standardize ourselves and realize that both personal and global progress comes from encouraging ourselves to do something different, something that will make us uncomfortable, that will challenge us, but that it’s going to open up real opportunities for all of us.

---