The Two Kinds of Stories We Need

Seeing ourselves helps us heal. Seeing each other helps us grow. #TransparentTuesday

Hi friend,

I'm reading a book right now called Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, and I am completely obsessed with it.

It’s the first book in a YA science fantasy trilogy, which is very much my jam already. But then it’s also written by a Chinese non-binary author, it features a non-binary protagonist (so rare!!) and it takes ideas that are already deeply interesting to me—think: gender, identity, power, mythology, culture—and weaves them together into a really special and unique sci-fi/fantasy world. 

I love that the character’s gender identity is neither a random throwaway detail, nor the source of a tortured and reductive “queer suffering” story. Instead, the author is exploring the limitations and fallacies of binary gender roles and identities through the culturally rooted (and gender-adjacent) lens of yin and yang. It’s so brilliantly creative and compelling, but that’s still not why I’m loving it, because the thing is…

As a non-binary person, reading a story like this is deeeeply joyful and satisfying.

Not because I need every story to be about people like me, and certainly not because I struggle to relate to protagonists whose identities differ from my own. (Like most people who love books but don’t happen to be men, I've spent my whole life doing exactly that, lol!)

It’s just that there is a particular kind of bliss that comes from having our own experiences and identities reflected back to us in the stories and media we consume. It reminds us that we’re valid, normal, acceptable, and very much not alone… and for me personally at least, I get a little euphoric explosion inside my chest that I think would be best described by either “feely deeply held by community,” or “ohmigod the world is full of secret new friends!”

With all of that said, the other reason I’m loving this book so much has nothing whatsoever to do with feeling seen or represented at all. In fact, kind of the exact opposite!

I love being immersed in ideas, perspectives, traditions, cultural assumptions, and historical references that are completely different from mine. 

The author is Chinese, and I constantly have these moments where I realize that I am very much an outsider to the culture that they’re drawing from as I read, which is sort of the inverse experience to “feeling represented.”

But instead of this making me feel disconnected or detached, I just find myself feeling incredibly curious and delighted. I both want to learn more and better understand the context, history, and meaning… and also I feel so utterly blessed by this author for introducing me to new ideas and helping me to think interesting new thoughts!

The more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that I love these two opposing experiences for entirely different reasons, and that they’re actually both equally powerful and important when it comes to personal growth, healing, and expanding our hearts and minds.

One experience allows us to recognize and root ourselves, and the other allows us to expand and improve ourselves—and we need both. 

Seeing ourselves reflected back to us can be deeply healing, especially when we've spent years feeling invisible, misunderstood, or outside the norm, which is why representation in marketing and media is so important, in particular for marginalized people.

When we rarely see people like ourselves represented—especially in positive ways—it can create a subtle but powerful sense of otherness, wrongness, or inferiority. 

Sometimes that otherness shows up as shame, or loneliness. Sometimes it manifests as the quiet assumption that people like us are weird, defective, inadequate, or unacceptable. These negative feelings and ideas about ourselves aren't something that we consciously choose, but they emerge slowly through repetition and conditioning, through the stories we consume, the communities we inhabit, and the cultural messages we absorb.

I've seen versions of this dynamic over and over again in my coaching work. 

Someone discovers that the secret thing they thought was uniquely wrong with them is actually a normal human experience, or that other people share their struggles around body image, aging, neurodivergence, sensitivity, sexuality, gender, grief, or relationships… and there is an almost immediate shift that I sometimes call “shame-busting.”

The shame doesn't disappear entirely, but it loses some of its authority. It's a lot harder to believe you're fundamentally broken when you’re met by evidence that other people just like you exist and are worthy of love, respect, belonging, and joy.

In some ways, I think seeing ourselves represented in this way can accomplish things that even years of self-improvement work struggle to accomplish. 

Therapy, coaching, self-reflection, and personal growth are all incredibly valuable. But there is distinctively healing about looking outward and finding evidence that you’re not alone. Coping skills and mindset shifts are great, but sometimes the fastest way to let go of negative self-beliefs is to discover that the thing we once believed made us unworthy or inferior is actually part of a much larger human experience.

At the same time, I think exposure to people who are different from us has its own kind of transformative power, and I suspect we underestimate just how profound that can be.

Being exposed to new and different people and ideas has a way of stretching the boundaries of what we understand to be possible, normal, human, and true. This both expands our idea of what kind of lives are possible for ourselves, and provides us with permission to do and be more than we ever might have imagined otherwise. It also tears down negative judgments about other people…

Because all of our socially conditioned and oppressive biases, stereotypes, fears, and prejudices require a certain amount of distance from the subject. 

It's remarkably easy to hold rigid and negative beliefs about groups of people you've never meaningfully encountered and view as “others.” It’s easy to reduce people to categories when they remain abstract. But those biases are automatically corrupted and challenged when exposure turns those abstractions into real human beings.

I've become increasingly convinced over the years that exposure to different kinds of people dismantles prejudice more effectively than intellectual arguments ever could. 

It's one thing to tell yourself that a stereotype is inaccurate, but another thing entirely to encounter enough real people that the stereotype becomes simply impossible to maintain. And it’s one thing to tell yourself something is hypothetically possible, but if you’ve never seen or heard about it existing, it can be both difficult to imagine, and impossible to take action toward. 

So these seem to be the two powerful poles, in both story-telling and in life: representation and exposure. 

Representation helps us recognize ourselves; exposure helps us recognize each other.

Representation challenges shame; exposure challenges prejudice.

Representation reminds us that we belong; exposure reminds us that other people belong too.

One helps us feel rooted; the other helps us grow.

One is a mirror; one is a window.

And we need both.

Iron Widow is one of those perfect experiences for me of both—part of me feels seen, and another part of me feels stretched. Part of me experiences the relief of recognition, and another part of me experiences the excitement of discovery. But the result isn't just that I learn more about non-binary identity or Chinese culture.

The result is that my world gets both bigger, and deeper.

And while I happen to be passionate about books, this isn’t even really about the things we read or watch. 

Because ideally we would be able to do this—the seeking of both representation and exposure—in our actual lives, communities, relationships, and experiences.

But sometimes that can be difficult to make happen the way we want it to, for any number of reasons, and it’s not always something we can control. And what we can control are the stories and media we choose to consume: the books we choose to read, the shows and movies we choose to watch, the podcasts we choose to listen to, and the creators we choose to follow.

These are all ways in which we can consciously choose either the representation we need to anchor our identities and push back against shame and isolation… or the exposure we need to grow our imaginations and increase our compassion.

And as a lifelong reader, I will both spend the rest of my life looking for these kinds of stories and experiences, and absolutely reveling in the fact that I get to exist at the same time as authors like Xiran Jay Zhao.

Big hug,

Jessi