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Declan Sperry

CAPA GIC Internship Course

11 September 2021

My Single Story: Reflection Assignment

When beginning my preparation for this assignment, I initially struggled quite a bit with

identifying or solidifying what my ‘single story’ is. Part of this difficulty stemmed from my

general discomfort with reflecting too heavily on perceptions of myself, as doing so has

historically led to an increase in excessive self-consciousness that feeds into my pre-existing

struggles with social anxiety. Another source of difficulty present in the process of identifying

my single story was my innate familiarity with my own existence. While it can be easy, although

unhelpful and reductive, to define others by a single story, it is far more difficult to boil down

one’s own lived experience into a simplified story free of nuance, as all individuals have pre-

existing knowledge of the nuances of their own lived experiences. All this to say, while

reflecting on how one is perceived is not particularly easy or comfortable, it is nonetheless a

critical component of self-improvement and in developing cultural intelligence.

Before exploring how those who do not know me personally may perceive me, I will first

provide a brief overview of how I view myself and my ‘single story’. As a child, I was raised as

a female in the state of Connecticut in a relatively upper-middle class family consisting of my

parents, my older brother, and myself. During my adolescence, a lot of things changed. Over the

course of a few years, my parents separated, I moved a couple of times, I left my high school

early to attend a local community college, and my mother moved across the country to

California. At the age of seventeen, I graduated with my high school diploma and a community
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college degree. Since then, I have spent a semester at my state’s largest public university, a

semester studying abroad in Cardiff, Wales, four months living and working in Bay Area,

California, and have returned to my home state of Connecticut where I work at Starbucks and

attend college remotely through Arizona State University online. After returning home and

having some time to self-reflect and sit with my thoughts, I figured out another piece of who I

was: I realized that I was transgender. After coming upon this realization, I began the process of

transitioning socially, legally, and medically from female to male. Having spent a large portion

of my life feeling like something unidentifiable just was not quite right, coming upon this

realization helped me become a lot more comfortable with myself and led to a major boost in

confidence and it fundamentally changed the way I viewed certain aspects of myself.

The story outlined above is what I imagine the events of my life might look like

presented in a logical and linear progression. However, that is not how I experience or view my

life. Rather than reflecting in a linear fashion, I tend to view the events in my life in a categorical

nature, with different plot lines running parallel to one another, each being defined by a different

key component of what makes me who I am. In this model, different lines would highlight key

moments relating to the different core values and aspects of identity which I consider central to

who I am as a person, such as having an appreciation for travel and learning about other cultures,

a tendency to be drawn towards leadership roles, a passion for creating actionable change

through organization and activism, and connections to my LGBT+ identity.

With regards to how I am perceived by teammates of my current internship site at

PepTalkHer, a wage gap focused start up based out of Sydney, Australia, my single story is

based primarily on what can be gathered from the resumé that I submitted and through our initial

Zoom calls. From these sources, it is likely that my internship team perceived my single story as
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one of social justice activism and heavy extracurricular involvement. In my resumé and

application, I spoke a great deal about my involvement in various extracurricular activities,

including my roles with Student led gender equality activism groups and leadership development

programs. By reading my application, my supervisors at my internship site got to view a very

polished, accomplishment-focused version of my single story. From this rendition of my story,

they likely gathered that I am a somewhat intelligent, heavily driven individual with a good work

ethic and interests in feminism and other forms of social justice.

With regards to first impressions based on virtual work site interactions, I do not feel as

though my teammates have been quick to jump to conclusions about me, and I strongly believe

that this is the result of various privileges that stem from intersecting aspects of my identity.

Based on appearance alone, most people do not immediately view me as belonging to any

specific marginalized groups. Because of this, I believe people are less likely to form judgements

about me and my life based on stereotypes and single stories, as representation for white, male

presenting people is abundant in most forms of media in both my home country of the United

States and of the country in which my internship is based, Australia. As addressed by

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her TedTalk, single stories are often formulated when individuals

have only been exposed to a singular narrative surrounding a particular group that an individual

belongs to (Adichie, 2009). Therefore, the intersection of my whiteness and my maleness act to

position me in a group that is heavily represented in the society which I am interning in, making

those around me less likely to Pidgeon-hole me too drastically at the point of first impression. In

other words, my privilege provides me with the benefit of the doubt in many first impression

scenarios.
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On the topic of privilege and perception, I believe that my existence as a transgender

individual has provided me with unique insight into just how drastically a demographic factor

like gender can affect the ways in which a person’s actions are perceived. Having transitioned

after reaching adulthood, I have had the relatively unique experience of being perceived as both a

woman and as a man in my young adulthood. Since transitioning, I have noticed a drastic

difference in how my efforts and abilities are perceived. Back when I still identified and

presented as a woman, I remember that many of my abilities relating to having a high amount of

emotional intelligence were often dismissed as being a result of my femineity and as nothing

particularly impressive.

However, now that I present and identify as a man, I find people being unreasonably

quick to be impressed any time I display the bare minimum empathy required to be a considerate

person. Over the course of my transition, there was not a drastic change in my ability to

empathize with others or to act with compassion, but rather, there was a drastic shift in how my

pre-existing ability to do so was perceived. I believe this shift is the direct result of the tendency

for individuals to view EQ through a gendered lens, operating under the assumption that all

women are meant to have naturally high EQ levels, a phenomenon described by Julia Middleton

in both her TedTalk and in the introduction to her book on cultural intelligence (Middleton,

2014).

All of this reflecting leads me to the greater, underlying question that has driven this

process of introspection: How will understanding my own story from an outside perspective be

beneficial? Firstly, understanding myself and my lived experiences from a variety of viewpoints

allows me to move away from ego-centric and ethno-centric perspectives of my existence and to

reflect on my life from a more ethno-relative position. By considering how individuals at my

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internship host sight in Australia might view me, I am creating a perspective in which my culture

is not framed as the default or the standard, but rather, as just another culture that exists amongst

many more. In doing so, I believe that I have gained a more nuanced understanding of the

employees at my internship host site, as I have been able to remove my ‘American Glasses’ in

order to try on some ‘Australian Glasses’. Similarly, allowing myself to view my actions from an

outside perspective has allowed me to increase the productivity and accuracy of my work, as

stepping away from ego-centric self-perceptions has helped to highlight different biases that

affect how I view my efforts, such as self-enhancing bias and confirmation bias, which if left

unchecked can negatively affect performance.

While this paper has addressed a myriad of interrelated topics, I believe that the central

take-away that has underlined all the preceding sections is the importance of engaging in critical

self-reflections as part of the process of improving one’s own cultural intelligence and cultural

competency. The hardest possible culture to potentially understand is the culture that one belongs

to, therefore it can be inferred that managing to do so would be a great exercise in utilizing

cultural intelligence.
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Works Cited

Adiche, C. N. [TED]. (2009, October 7). The Danger of a Single Story: Chimamanda Ngozi

Adiche [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg

Middleton, J. (2014). Cultural Intelligence: The Competitive Edge for Leaders Crossing

Borders. Champlain College Dublin.