You Think You're So Special

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Yesterday, as she was getting ready to go out and meet her teenage friends, my daughter Sasha paused in front of the full-length mirror inside the hall closet to evaluate her outfit: ratty, baggy jeans; a black-gray henley; and a tan thrift-store jacket she and I found in Montreal. To my eyes, she looked totally normal. But she did not approve.

“I look too Brooklyn,” she declared. Then she swapped the jacket for a hoodie, deemed the look acceptably not over-Brooklyned, and left for the day.

What can a parent do but sigh and shrug? Teenagers are mysteries. They have their own secret lives, their own strange, half-evolved criteria for evaluating the world. You can make yourself crazy trying to understand them, and even crazier trying to bend them to your will, and you’ll still fail. You should still try, but you should expect to fail. These kids have come to the conclusion that they are unique individuals, and they will not be stopped, no matter the internal contradictions or trail of destruction left in their wake. It’s cute, isn’t it?

What teenagers don’t realize, or don’t want to recognize, is something that also took me a long time to realize: that we cannot escape stereotypes. The pre-formed identities of our culture, and likely of all cultures, exist, and no matter how we struggle to evade them, we always wind up in the clutches of one or the other. We define ourselves in large part by the way we dress and style ourselves, but also by the activities we engage in, the media we consume, the ways we interact with friends, family, and co-workers, and although the possibilities seem infinite, they are not. The definitions have already been written, and not by us.

For a long time, I struggled with this. I still struggle with it. I hate clichés, as a writer, as a reader, and as a human being. They’re the embodiment of laziness, a non-choice choice that requires no thought on the part of either writer or reader and that reduces the bizarreness and wonder of human experience to what we think we already know. I avoid them like the plague¹.

Yet they continue to exist!

Stereotypes, however, are not precisely clichés. They’re blobbier. They’re more loosely defined. And because of that, they’re harder to dodge. Every time we think we’re making an individualistic choice, we wind up pushing ourselves away from one stereotype and toward another. In changing her jacket, Sasha might no longer look “too Brooklyn,” but she was now more fully inhabiting the identity of Brooklyn Teen. There’s no way out, for her or for me. We think we’re Jean Valjean, but really we’re 24601.

More after the jump…

I’m Such a Stereotype

My personal stereotypes, in no particular order: Brooklyn Dad. Runner. New York City Foodie². Asian Foodie. Smart Alec. Overthinker. Oldest Sibling. Leo. Frustrated Journalist with a Substack (on Beehiiv). One or Perhaps Multiple Varieties of Nerd. Atheist Jew. Rock Climber (Subclass: Bouldering). Home Cook. Ex-Expat. Ex-Skateboarder. Snob.

It took a long time for me to accept that all the choices I had made in my life, when I thought I was being so clever and original, had led to my being, in so many ways, exactly like so many other people. That exact mix of stereotypes is not even unique, as I continue to encounter other journalistic Brooklyn dads who run and cook and have issues with their Judaism and are married to stylish Asian women. Oh god, the clichés are overwhelming! How did I—we—wind up here?

But maybe here’s not such a bad place to be. On the one hand, you can actually understand a lot about me by looking at that list of stereotypes, some of which I stumbled into, others of which I heartily embraced. None of those may really tell you about my internal character (we’ll get to that below), but they do tell you about what I do, day to day and minute to minute. And what I do, how I outwardly act, is a pretty good proxy for who I am. Not perfect, not identical, but still enough for anyone to understand, and maybe even predict, my motivations and my decisions.

And that’s all most people need, isn’t it? We don’t need to glance around at the crazy variety of human beings we might encounter at any moment and suss out their innermost thoughts and emotions. We just need enough cues and hints to be able to interact in the most superficial ways, so we can just get through today, and the rest of our lives. As the meme goes, ma’am, this is a Wendy’s—and we’re all stuck in the drive-thru.

Still, no one wants their innermost self to be reduced to a spewed-out litany of stereotypes. And so we have to be two-minded about this. Yes, we are mostly the stereotypes we have chosen to be, but those stereotypes are also just an illusion. When we map out the Venn diagram of all of our identities, we must imagine a single, solitary empty circle hidden among the overlapping arcs. It’s unlabeled, a leftover overshadowed by the frantic display of selfhood. But this is also us, the core of us, the indefinable nugget that will never fit in. We remain individuals, exactly like all the other 8.025 billion individuals on this planet.

When I think about stereotypes, I often find myself pondering the Tokyo fashion cliques of the 1990s: the Harajuku girls, the kogaru, the rockabilly boys. At the time, and for a good while afterward, those fashion identities were seen in America as revelations, unparalleled expressions of creativity. And yeah, they were pretty cool.

But, as I believe the writer W. David Marx pointed out in his book Ametora, those fashions were not expressions of individual identity. In fact, they were uniforms, each with its own rules and requirements that defined the group. Fail to live up to them, or go beyond them in unapproved ways, and you were suddenly outside the clique. You were doing it wrong, when the whole idea was to do it right—to fit in to a predefined stereotype. How well you embodied it, with which acceptable quirks and embellishments and whatever the Japanese equivalent of sprezzatura is, is how you were judged.

The important thing, though, was understanding that this was a uniform. It might define what you do, but not who you are. We put uniforms on, to go to work or school or a nice restaurant or the rock-climbing gym, and we take them off, change into others, as the situation dictates. No one questions this. And so maybe this is the way to think of identity and its attendant stereotypes: as nothing more than a series of interchangeable ensembles that allow us to inhabit multiple versions of ourselves, each of which revolves elliptically around the untouched sun of our soul. My name is Legion, for we are many, and we have a storage locker full of outfits to try on. Or is that too Brooklyn a way of thinking about things? 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. This is, tragically, the best joke I’ve ever written.

2. Hate the word foodie, but it’s appropriate here.

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