Someone from work asks me out to lunch and I go with them.

There are handsome young men and pretty young women, in expensive suits and dresses, unwrapping silk scarves and smiling perfect smiles from underneath the latest haircuts. My flat gray shirt and ill-fitting pants are bad enough, but my battered shoes make me feel even more embarrassed. I try not to talk too much, self conscious of my voice, my skin, my hair, my posture, my gut, my age.

Everybody talks about their alma mater, many people are from Cornell, and they have that kinship, the familial way of talking the same language that excludes without meaning to. Affluence is abundantly displayed by everyone, not just monetary affluence but cultural and familial. And I try to think that I won't want it, but that'd be a lie.

Imagine a life not yours, and it becomes so easy to victimize my own situations. People free to make their own choices without the weight or burden of a past. Of course it isn't true. But today, at lunch, I felt otherwise very keenly. And when someone in the party receives bad news, it shatters the illusion.

The disparity isn't quite so great, and I might feel inadequate in so many ways, inferior even, perhaps when I experience confusion about racial depression in other minorities, I can just think back to this moment. Of being the only non white person and the feeling of utter alienation, the feeling of ugliness, the feeling of worthlessness, and it wasn't for any action taking by the people who invited me out to lunch with them, but rather, due to a failure of my own sense of self-worth.

Perhaps I should be glad that my child won't bear the stigma as keenly. It should be fair, it should be able to pass for Caucasian, and perhaps, even fail to inherit this racial self-identity. It isn't worth this agony.