Tell Us What Makes You Unique

Written by Meg RuoccoPhotgraphy by Noah Laroia-NguyenI recently came across a job application that asked me to “tell us what makes you unique.” I smiled, confident I could craft a beautiful and interesting answer. Instead, I spent the next 32 minutes having an existential crisis. Am I unique? Have I ever been unique? Am I an interesting person at all? Dear God, I can’t think of one interesting thing that’s happened to me, ever. Determined to come up with an answer, I took some mindful breaths and wrote from the heart. That’s something I’m still trying to figure out, I think. I could sit here and talk about how a singular pattern of stardust compiled itself into my body, never seen before and never to be seen again. I could talk about how I am a microcosm, a universe made up of galactic consciousness and supernova dreams, that solar winds rip through childhood doubts and somewhere, tucked away into a long-forgotten nook of a nebula, lay that one time during a high school play rehearsal I tripped and fell and as I got up saying “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I tripped and fell again. Needless to say they didn’t put me in too many dance numbers.  I could talk about how I orbit around the center of my solar system family, of my librarian mom, my architecture dad, my designer sister, my actor brother—a collection of stars, beautiful and brilliant. That they pour their creativity into me using the Big Dipper as a ladle, supporting me as I pursue my dream of being “I don’t know, a storyteller, I guess?” and how I continue to seek out what that means through music, through comedy, through writing. I could talk about my moonbeam memories, my times working in and working for Core Leadership where I first asked who gets the platform to tell stories and why? And how can we be more mindful of those dissonant narratives? I could talk about the first time I learned the term ‘intercultural’ and it was a far-away comet hurtling toward me, twirling on its ‘intersectional’ tail. It crashed into my planets and altered their shape, changing the way they moved with one another, making them different but better, more capable of supporting life. I could talk about my solar flare for comedy, my times on stages sending radio-signal jokes into space, hoping some alien might hear it and relate, or at least exhale the air out of their nose a little faster. Assuming they have a nose.I could talk about all of these things, but I don’t know if there’s some far-away corner of the cosmos that’s exactly like mine. When the website told me my answer was 8000 characters over the maximum character limit, I changed it to a one-sentence anecdote about a rap I sang once. Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.