Pandora’s Box
By ARYAN AGARWAL ‘27 and GRACE YANG ‘27
“I think the root cause of hatred is just misunderstanding. We judge people when we don’t know enough about them.”
“Well, I disagree. I think hatred serves as self-defense.”
Maybe both of us are right. When we feel threatened, disrespected, and mistreated, hatred allows us to build a wall for protection — in a way, it gives us a safe space, a place where we can avoid raw confrontation. “They’re just a bad person — I don’t need to make up with them.” As humans, we often simplify our understanding of the world by categorizing experiences and emotions: good and evil, beautiful and ugly, “I love them,” or “I hate them.” To classify things on one end or the other gives comfort and peace to our minds — it removes complexity, letting us strip away the nuances of life by sticking on an easy label. When everything is so overwhelmingly abstract, we cover it with a box by hiding the vague truth. Fear shuts our eyes as we shy away from the intricacy of human existence because we dread the risks of fully engaging our hearts. Our apprehension stems from the chance that others may exploit our empathy. We worry that our first impressions may be flawed, that there are deeper layers hidden beneath the surface, and thus hesitate to try understanding others. It feels safer to retreat to a place of indifference rather than risk vulnerability — sometimes it just seems easier to avoid “getting it.”
And maybe, that isn’t such a bad thing after all. We don’t owe it to everyone to try and understand where they’re coming from. Sometimes, it’s ok to leave things unresolved and say “I don’t care,” when it gives us the path to walk away happier — they do say, “Where ignorance is bliss, tis’ folly to be wise.” Being blinded by the box can give us closure, like taking out your contacts so you’re only able to see the blur of the shape. But we can’t just call it a day. We can’t always live with peas hiding in our mattresses. We can’t judge the mattress when we’re oblivious to the peas. We can’t judge a person without acknowledging their beauty. We can’t grade narratives without sympathizing with the intimate stories.
The time-old story of writing them is seriously haunting.
Staring at the rubric, the platitudes dizzy your head: tension, description, resolution, and all the rest. These are the hallmarks of an “A-grade narrative,” the ingredients for supposedly “beautiful” writing — perhaps, this is “the box.” The box is vague though, a shadow with blurry boundaries. Confused, we go down the path of trauma dumping.
“Make sure to write about something deep,” is what your friends tell you — appropriation, racism, family issues, and anything else that elicits tears. Your fingers pause on the keyboard; is this storytelling or self-exploitation? It doesn’t matter when it’s for the grade, though, does it? So, you press on. You pour your unfiltered history into structured paragraphs because that’s what the system demands.
But, can English narratives be judged? We act as though they can — each one is put on a scale, apparently quantifying how “good” it is. Writing itself is something that can be objectified: flow, sentence structure, grounded storytelling, grammar, prose — these are concrete metrics. The issue is when we’re getting graded, the approach was to depersonalize the stories themselves, invalidate the traumatic experience, and fictionalize the raw emotions behind a narrative: that’s when the box comes into play. When you judge the tale itself, you consider how entertaining someone’s life experiences are; you are giving someone’s personality a score.
What if we judge people like how English teachers slap a grade on our writing? We endlessly complain about the subjectivity, ambiguity, and insensitivity in this system. But it’s funny because every one of us is a hypocrite, including the two of us. Especially Grace. We subconsciously whisper, “Look at his shoes,” or “Her mascara looks clumpy,” or “Did you know they’re flirting?” Through words and judgments, we greet someone we’ve never talked to before. While our impulsive comments are meant to be the telling of their character, they’re truly a reflection of our own.
“Do you believe in past lives?” A question that lingers as we meet new people.
Pause. Laugh. “When special people come into our lives, they are the missing piece of the incomplete puzzle that is our existence. It’s almost like you were meant to meet.”
There’s beauty in meeting these people – something about them feels uncannily familiar, as though they are fragments of moments we’ve known before but can’t quite place. It’s enough to make us wonder; maybe souls cross paths more than once. We’re drawn to strangers by the subtle echoes that guide us: the warmth of a smile that reminds us of summer evenings with friends, the jokes and laughs that feel like your siblings, and the tight embrace that feels like home. Even as simple as the one student sitting at the Harkness table, adequately speaking like your friend in your class last term, their presence brings comfort and you slowly start to look forward to this class. The beauty of this familiarity creates the magnetic pull we feel toward strangers who never stepped foot into our lives before.
We judge quickly, instinctively. Their energy either wraps us in a comforting embrace or warns us to keep our distance. “Vibes,” we call it. Those vibes often echo familiarity, something we seek in a smile that mirrors kindness, in humor that clicks without explanation, in stories that resonate even when we’ve never heard them before. It’s not just charisma that captivates us; it’s the feeling that we’ve somehow already known them, in another time, another space, or even just in our imagination. In our insanely high standards, we hold against ourselves, in our dreams of carving a perfect personality, in our yearns to transform into someone else, people we attract to also reflect a version of ourselves. When we meet someone who completes our puzzle, their existence doesn’t seem strange, yet recognizable as it’s something we’ve been longing for all along. And perhaps that’s why beauty often lies not just in uniqueness, but in the threads that connect strangers to something we’ve always understood.
