The line that struck me the most from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TED talk was this: “The tradition of telling African stories in the West [is] of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference.” It’s really true. When we look at people whom we perceive as different from us, whom we cannot identify at first glance, we see all the ways in which they’re not like us, rather than all the ways they are like us. Where there should be the promise of friendship, there is instead only pity, aversion, or some other emotion which comes from seeing the other person as being on a different level from oneself, rather than as an equal. It’s because we see people only in the way we expect them to be – we think there is only, well, a single story behind them. As Adichie said, “To insist on only [the] negative stories [from my past] is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me….The danger of stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” When looking at another person, while it’s certainly easier to think you know everything there is to know about someone, to put it simply, you don’t. To treat another person as a human being is to accept that they, same as yourself, are made up of a myriad of experiences, influences, and countless other factors, and that you can’t really know them until you understand more about who they are, and the unique factors that have shaped them. Anyway, I think that seeing other people in this light opens up whole new worlds of possibilities – despite what you may think you see at first, each person is as complex as you are. Whether or not you get along with each other, or can see eye-to-eye, depends on the individual – it won’t always be the case, but it’s better to try and give them a chance, than to assume you already know who they are, because you don’t. So perhaps the only reliable single story is: Everyone’s similar, and everyone’s different. Beyond that, you’ll have to see for yourself.