Who Am I To You?
ABOUT ME
"My name is Zoe Bernardi, and I'm a sophomore studying Psychology and Writing at the University of Michigan."
Why do we do that? Why when we introduce ourselves do we always include the same few bits of information? Yes I'm a student, yes I study Psychology, but there is so much more to me than just that.
I am a friend, a daughter, an older sister. I am a reader, a writer, a thinker, a skeptic. I crochet, I serve on the executive board of a nonprofit, I watch RuPaul's Drag Race every Friday with my friends.
There are so many ways to define ourselves, and yet we somehow always manage to get stuck using these same templates. The first question when I meet someone new is almost consistently "What's your major?" or "What do you do?".
This is exactly why I chose to focus on the harm in labeling people. When we reduce someone's identity to a single word, it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy—labels stick. If they don't suffocate underneath the weight of your words, they will spend the rest of their life searching for the right ones.
Each picture you see depicts a different person, all of whom live inside of me. I feel my seven year old self when I'm in line for ice cream even though it's cold outside. I hear my twelve year old self whispering fun facts in my ear each time I re-watch a Harry Potter movie. I see my seventeen year old self when I look in the mirror of my college apartment, realizing that I'm living out her dreams.
All these people share an innate yearning to know exactly who they are. But I have spent so much of my life wondering when I'll know myself as well as everyone else does, and I don't want to do that anymore. My initial goal, which you can view more in depth on the "Initial Project" page, was to almost call people out on their actions.
"No one should feel as though they need to prove their existence—yet time and time again we expect a justification for the lives people live. We selfishly assign labels to strangers in an attempt to make ourselves more comfortable, forgetting that a label can be just as dangerous as the absence of one."
Who Am I To You? The Harmful Intersection of Queerness and Assumption (2021)
Now, my hope is that my message comes across as much more hopeful. If not hopeful, at least artistic and honest. This zine is an amalgamation of everything I love and everything I am. It is both a love letter to every other queer kid struggling to find themselves and to myself. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Last year, I turned in a piece titled, "Who Am I To You? The Harmful Intersection of Queerness and Assumption" for my English 125 class at the University of Michigan. When I wrote it, I was busy wrapping up my very first semester of college.
I was told to write a narrative argument, taking inspiration from a scholarly source and including both my story, and the story of someone close to me. Ultimately, I decided to recount the events that have come along with growing up "gay," at least in the eyes of society.
Before I had ever even considered labeling myself as anything, the world saw fit to do it for me. There isn't a conscious memory of my childhood without the added assumption of my identity. People at school talked about it, my friends joked about it, my family inquired about it...the only person without a clue was me.
This semester (Winter 2023) I enrolled in Writing 220, a class intended to serve as a gateway to the Sweetland Minor in Writing program--something I applied for and was accepted to at the end of last year. Throughout the semester, our mission was to take an old piece and revamp it. Take your work and translate it into different modalities, look at it under different lighting, break it apart, and put it back together without worrying about perfection.
I could have easily segued into something more rooted in fiction, a short story, perhaps. I also could have further explored the realm of academia, opting to write a strongly-worded scholarly argument concerning the harmful effects of labeling.
If you couldn't deduce from my (rather obvious) tone above, it was clearly neither of those options. Rather, I chose to present my thoughts in a much more personal manner--in the form of a zine.
This project is an amalgamation of poems, prose, and propositions from throughout my life. It was startling how many pieces from my past managed to hold their own within the context of my zine. Not only were the topics relevant to the theme of my project, but they were extremely poignant and moving. One particular poem, which was written in 2013, my fourth-grade year, manages to blow me away every time I re-read it.
It takes a great deal of courage to leave this project in the hands of the public, seeing as they haven't been too kind to me in the past, but times have changed. And regardless of my feelings, there will always be someone who needs to hear these words, and who I am to deny them that right?