Which aspects do you think makes a person unique?
What makes a person unique can’t be boiled down to a certain aspect. It’s all the things—how someone thinks, what they believe in, what their hobbies are, the things they say, etc. And it’s the distinct combination of those things that really bring out the uniqueness. In all reality though, aren’t we all unique? There can’t possibly be two people in this world who are identical in every aspect. I think also, uniqueness is subjective. A particular combination of personality traits might not be interesting to everybody, but interesting to some.
As I thought about this subject, it didn’t take me long to immediately think of Sister Joan. Being that I worked for many years in a Catholic school, it’s not surprising that I initially worked on a faculty that had three nuns. Technically, they were sisters. Nuns are the ones that stay within a convent and don’t leave. These ladies lived together, but obviously worked out in the community. Sister Joan was the middle school science teacher. The individual things that make her unique aren’t so interesting by themselves. Well, the fact that she was a nun was interesting on its own. Aside from that, she was a knitter. I’m a knitter. But she was a nun who knit. And maybe it was that fact that caused people to almost throw hands at the PTO auction one year over a little purse that she knit and then felted. For reference, I made the same exact bag for about 20 dollars in materials. Her bag? The highest bid on the bag was $600! There was such a frenzy over it. I made the same one just to commemorate how awesome it was to see a room full of Catholic school parents brutally bidding on this little bag knit by a nun.
But that’s not the only thing that I remember about her. Again, she was a very devout Catholic. She renewed her vows every year. However, she was a firm-believer in the theory of evolution. That seemed very contradictory to me. But that added to her uniqueness. Lots of people believe in evolution. That’s not special. But a Catholic nun who believed in it? That’s something.
So, her hobbies, her beliefs, and even the way she talked. We had a family at the school whose last name was Leach. There were three siblings in that family and during dismissal, when one of us would see their parents’ car coming around the corner of the pick-up line, we would yell, “Leaches!” Our intent was to get the attention of all the Leach siblings so that they would be ready to tuck and roll into their van when it came to the front and we could keep the line moving. Sister Joan hated that! Apparently she didn’t like that it sounded like we were calling for the blood-sucking critters…what are they? Are they amphibians? Reptiles? I don’t know. Inevitably, if one of us yelled “Leaches!”, she would counter, in an even louder voice, “Leach FAMILY!” It made me smile every time. Long after the sisters left the school and had to return to their hometown for new assignments, I would still tell the kids about the nun who used to work there who always yelled at the kids to “stay off the grass!”. She also hated when they walked across the grass instead of the sidewalk. Any of us teachers could yell at the kids to stay off the grass, but just the fact that it was Sister Joan, the nun who believed in evolution and knit bags people fought over made her legendary. At least in my mind. Others may have seen all of these aspects of her and just thought she was mean.
That’s the long story of why it’s all the things that make people unique. What they say—the way my brother-in-law says “true that” instead of “true dat”, how they say it—the way the senior secretary at work arches a fist back when she’s telling me about someone who recently irritated her. Beliefs, actions, preferences, all of it.
I really enjoyed thinking about this prompt. There are so many things that come to mind about specific people that I’ve met throughout my life that I find unique. That’s the beautiful thing about being human. We really are all different. Sometimes different in the most surprising ways.
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