Opinion

My parents have always instructed me not to talk to strangers, and, as a kid, I took this command with utmost seriousness. In fact, I would say I took this instruction to an extreme degree. I’d shut my mouth, lock it and throw away the key.

When I was a child, we would go to Tijuana to visit family, and on our way back from Mexico, the officers at the border would ask us the standard questions regarding our citizenship: On what business were we crossing the border, what was our citizenship status … the list goes on. And, as always, they would address my brother and me directly. They would ask a separate set of questions, each designed to, as I now know, figure out whether my brother and I were being illegally taken into the United States. And on more than one occasion, we completely refused to answer these questions. It was only after the officer asked why we couldn’t respond that we would answer, “Our parents told us never to talk to strangers.”

Now, clearly I made it back into the United States somehow, but this issue persisted regardless of country; I would simply refuse to speak to anyone I didn’t already know.

Needless to say, it’s a terrible way to go about making friends.

It took a lot of effort to get over this problem. It was parenting gone too far, and, even consciously knowing that, I couldn’t figure out how to just get out there and talk.

While I know that I’m not completely over my communication problem, I will say that Berkeley has been an incredibly effective start to a solution. Yes, there is that initial crazed rush to make friends (kind of similar to being thrown into a pool in order to learn how to swim), but while that certainly helped to get me over my problem, it’s more of a quick fix than any real change. It’s just being here at Berkeley, meeting people I normally wouldn’t meet, getting to know them and realizing that maybe strangers aren’t all that strange.

Take, for example, a new friend of mine who I met in a cafe I now frequent. He’s an older man, somewhere in his 60s, the kind of person who is instantly associated with a lifetime of experiences. Normally, I see these kinds of people, label them as “other” and resume my day in a typical fashion, mostly pretending they don’t exist.

Except, on one of my usual evenings of caffeine-assisted studying, I noticed that the man was drawing the people in the cafe — and absolutely beautifully. As someone who enjoys drawing, I took a lot of interest in his manner of practice and decided to try it myself. It was after seeing a few of my sketches that the older man asked if I wanted some tips.

He sat down at a table adjacent to mine, began giving me warm-up exercises, tips with what materials to use how to hold my hand. Noticing my interest in Batman and comic books in general, he even began showing me techniques that comic book artists use, always relating back to his own time working on similar art projects. He gave me one of his pens, a pencil and paper, all with the promise of teaching me more.

And that’s how I came to know an incredible artist, one who has worked story-boarding movies, designing cartoon characters and is currently writing his own graphic novel — none of which I would have known had I sat there in silence, frozen by the idea of an unknown person approaching me.

It’s not even about being a cripplingly shy person (that’s an entirely different beast); it’s the idea that anyone you haven’t met yet falls automatically into the category of “stranger,” a word with unfavorable connotations. It’s a prejudice based solely on the fact that this person hasn’t accidentally been happened upon before.

Having realized this, I’m trying to get around these preconceived notions about strangers and boil them down to the facts: There’s nothing inherently weird or strange about someone being unknown. Being someone unknown doesn’t make a person any less worthy of your time. Most importantly, there isn’t anything necessarily negative to someone unknown. In fact, the only thing that can really be deduced about someone unknown is the fact that you don’t really know them.

While I’m not advocating going out there and talking to every single stranger on the street — not only would that be exhausting, but there is still some merit to that “don’t talk to strangers” adage — keeping an open mind is essential. It might be important to starting a career path, crossing over into another country or just making a new, helpful friend. And, rather than looking at it as talking to strangers, think of it as tapping into one of Berkeley’s — or anywhere else’s — greatest resources.

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