None of us are the same person in every room. The “skill” of changing our tone and mannerisms to match those of the people around us is ingrained into everyday life.
The voice that garners respect in class, the voice that brings you closer with friends, the voice that makes you feel like the kid other parents compare theirs to. It’s all to appeal to an arbitrary standard of excellence or importance — to feel like a “better” version of ourselves than we think we actually are. But who cares if we’re better than that standard? Maybe it makes us feel better in the moment, but what long-term benefit does it bring us? The answer is, that there is none. The more we cave to the transient expectations of the world around us, the more we lose ourselves in its wave of voices.
This is not as simple as rejecting code switching entirely. Code switching is a necessary skill for some of the situations we find ourselves in day-to-day lives. The intention is not to discourage it in appropriate settings, but it becomes a problem when a fabricated persona becomes our base-line. Students need to be able to state with conviction who they are and what they stand for. If this skill is lost, we stop being able to choose who we are. Individuality is one of the great strengths of a large, diverse community like the one we have here at PHS. If we let ourselves be shaped entirely by outside forces, then that individuality is lost, replaced by an inauthenticity that hinders positive interactions and social progress.
Inauthenticity has become a quiet force behind the strife we see across the country even today; it estranges us from our own identities, even among those who should understand us the most. It prompts us to wonder: is this version of the person I’m talking to right now the “real” one, or just the one they have learned to present? Regurgitating the same meaningless slang, the same humorless joke, the same printed ideas.
“Imitation is suicide,” writes the 19th century transcendentalist-based philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The point stands in that progress has never come from people who waited to be agreed with, from people who imitated to belong. The space race didn’t happen because scientists forced their ideas to fit under what was accepted at the time. The Civil Rights Movement didn’t advance because its leaders prioritized comfort and majority perception. Einstein’s theory of relativity challenged the foundations of physics before his ideas were ever understood, let alone agreed with.
When our actions aim to conform rather than create, no new innovations are made. Individual paths follow what is known to work, not what actually matters to the person choosing them. People build versions of what already exists. We see it now in the surge of startups, many of which are just AI wrappers that do the same thing with slight variation. They are not built to push an idea forward, but to fit within what is already working.
Choosing not to follow the path well-trodden is a risk, it has always been. You may not fit in as easily, and you may not be understood as quickly. But what you say is your own, and what you choose reflects that.
Every student in this school brings something different to a room. There’s value in that; it lets us create works of art with special meaning, and approach problems with unique insights. It creates a vibrant community and a culture that is truly special and meaningful. And by all means we should embrace that.