It’s In The Ingredients ?

Burritos

We are born like tortilla shells at Qdoba or Chipotle-
We come with a gender, a race, a mother, a father already added.

That is quite a bit considering we haven’t even touched on the genetics-
The stuff a dive in our gene pool will collect.

We grow into things: our constitution, genetic diseases, disabilities.

There are things that get taken away sometimes-

baby fat, space between teeth, lankiness, speech impediments.
Sometimes, by the miracle of science, a heart defect or some other 
medical condition.

We usually start to show our knowledge of addition. A walk, a voice, mannerisms,
added in

and somewhere in there we learn that some things are chosen parts of our order:
certain character traits, the music we love and dislike, whether we prefer to play alone or with lots of others.

and we also learn there are things we might have been born with that we are given no choice over how people respond to them being in our makeup.

the color of our skin, our gender, our sexual orientation, the structure of our
bones, the overall way our bodies are built.

We learn people subtract us from experiences, from being ‘human’ because of these things.

So many of us add confusion, self-doubt, feelings of shame, exhaustion
for having characteristics that flavor us different.

We will add more as time goes on: our cries for love, our beliefs in Gods, our longings, our hopes, our friendships, and our ability to stand up for ourselves.

Some will be denied ingredients right from the start: family, class, beauty, health, and others will learn through subtraction those losses over time.

What amazes me is how much of our order is already determined at birth
and how we spend so many years fighting to convince others.

We have the same unique taste as everyone else. The fight for many
starts the day something we will never control gets scooped up into our order.

The funny thing is if you go to the restaurant we all order the same thing.
The menu reads ‘one human.’ What’s inside doesn’t change that much.

When you go to a Mexican restaurant the menu says ‘burrito,’ that does not change because you have rice or you don’t.

Humans understand this, but we struggle with the same concept.
We’re all made ‘human,’ that doesn’t change because one’s deaf, or one’s got a different shape, or racial profile.

Yet, we kill in the name of differences put into humans and
and just let burritos be burritos.