What's Your Favorite Color?

“What’s your favorite color?”

This social crutch has been used since kindergarten

and is the basic question of first impressions.

I’ve been asked this a million times and I’ve had answers twenty different ways,

pink, red, blue, green,

but it never goes past skin deep.

 

Nobody knows anything about the world,

but school is idolized to prepare us for it,

described as an old friend who says, “Take me by the hand,”

ignorance lining their palm,

“I’ll show you the proper plan.”

 

They teach us to greet a stranger with kindness in our tone

and vigilance in our bones

and to ask them a question, simple as that.

“How are you today?”

A verbal tip of the hat.

 

‘Get to know you’ questions are an expectation,

the first day of class is already known before you step a foot through the door.

The thing is, schools don’t cover identity.

We don’t explore our personal options until we’ve become old,

face heartbreak.

 

I know my identity, but it came from years of feeling wrong.

Years of not fitting in with gender roles.

Years of imagining my future boyfriend.

Years of pushing away the twinge in my gut everytime I was referred too as a tomboy or wore a dress.

Years of built-up emotion and undiagnosed anxiety.

 

I know who I am because I’ve had a personal struggle.

We all have. The younger generation more than ever.

Just before that was when I realized how little school actually teaches us.

 

When I was thinking one day,

about anything at all,

and then I was asked: “Who are you?”

And I froze, unlike I ever had before,

stunned by a simple question

I didn’t know how to answer,

because I’d never been told to study it before.

 

This poem is about: 
Me

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