May All of Our Names be Verbs

This from the book YEARNINGS by Irwin Kula:

"What makes you unique?" My daughter Gabriella was asked this question on a high school entrance application. The essay was due in a couple of days, and it seemed simple enough. Yet she put it off and put it off. When I finally pushed her to complete the essay, she said she couldn't figure out what to write. "Dad, nothing about me is unique." Had Gabriella entered that notorious stage when girls lose their sense of self in the swirl of adolescence? My wife and I were mystified. Gabriella was a developing artist -- designing her own clothes -- and a talented writer. She was effervescent, living, and always making new friends. Didn't she see how special she was? Her response blew me away. "Yeah, Dad, but lots of other people are those things. And besides, none of it is all of who I am. I'm everything put together, and not even that. There's always new stuff." Her essay turned out to be a critique of the question, an argument against assuming we are ever complete, entirely knowable. AS Gabriella wrote, "What makes me unique is that I am always Gabriella-ing. No one else in the world does that."

Bitchy and cranky, jangly and mean all day long, I'm going to go into my lair and Daisy for a while. May all of our names be VERBS.

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