So, my genetics are a bit of a mess.
I knew even before getting genetic testing that I was a mix of at least 5 different European heritages and that my forebears were mostly poor immigrants who came to the US around the late 1800s or early 1900s.
After getting my DNA tested, I learned that in addition to being German, English, Irish, Dutch, French, and Prussian, I have also got some Nordic, Mediterranean, Eastern European, and Southern European and teeny tiny bit of Indian DNA floating around in there.
Despite this, I can’t point out a particular family tradition that screams “yep, I belong to ____ culture! I’m a ____!” unless, perhaps, you count the Catholicism and the drunken family gatherings as Irish traditions. I never had any living relatives who were first generation immigrants.
This isn’t really that weird. It’s the American experience for a good chunk of people.
It can be good AND bad.
On the positive side, I have genuinely happy feelings about being a “human melting pot” and I love in that my little nuclear family we’re continuing the tradition of blending cultures. I love soaking up knowledge about Chinese history, culture, language and food, and celebrating my adopted holidays. I hope our kids feel this way, too. Someday, I hope we’re like the “United Nations” of families.
On the other hand…I have no real connection to my own disparate cultures of origin.
No “long family traditions”.
No recipes handed down from great-great-great-great grannies.
I don’t know any of the names of my relatives who came before my grandparents, actually.
A 100-year-old building seems like ancient ruins to me. (Or at least it did when I was growing up).
Because of this, I often assumed I had “no culture” of my own when I was growing up.
That is…until I moved to Germany for seven months to be an au-pair.
Naively, I assumed that my ancestral “German-ness” would just transfer automatically and I would just feel right at home straightaway.
Nope. I felt like I had traveled to another planet.
This isn’t a diss on Germany; it’s a comment about my naivety.
With that experience, I suddenly learned that I DO have a culture. And, it’s American. It’s not just a name on my passport, but a whole-ass cultural identity.
That’s what the culture shock was for me. Not that other people were different from me – but that I WAS different from THEM.
Part of the shock, too, was that the things that made me American aren’t what I thought they were. A lot of the things I have in common with other Americans - and the things people associated with Americanism - aren’t things I feel proud of. And that some of them were even horrifying.
It took being immersed in a different country, surround by people speaking a different language and losing my status and power as a native speaker and citizen for me to properly understand the nuance of my own identity.
It’s a lesson I’ve re-learned a few times since then.
If you made it this far, you might wonder what in the literal freak any of this has to do with thriving as a creative person at work, e.g. the stated purpose of my newsletter.
Everything. It has EVERYTHING to do with it.
Being able to comprehend that your own experience is limited, finite, imperfect — and sometimes even detrimental — to the audience you’re designing something for — is absolutely critical to being a successful designer, content creator, marketer, creative director, manager of humans.
There’s thousands of different cultures thriving in the world, and they all arrived at solutions to problems using different value and logic systems.
In German, the verb often comes towards the end of a sentence. In Chinese, a sentence is structured so that things go from being more general to being more specific. In English you have to do subject-verb-object.
Who’s right? No one. Everyone.
There’s an infinity of “right” answers under the stars, but there’s no absolutely correct one. There’s only “correct for this context.”
Remember this the next time you’re creating options for your clients.
Have a wonderful weekend 💛
-Cathy