by Julia Gong, ’17

For my senior capstone project, Of Common Threads (www.ofcommonthreads.wordpress.com), I’ve created a ‘literary patchwork’ of various personal stories from Cary Academy community members in hopes of documenting and immortalizing their narratives, celebrating our differences and common threads, and lending my voice to others. Through this project, I was also incredibly fortunate to get to know peers, faculty, and staff on a deeper level by understanding what means most to them.

Inspired by the spontaneous interviewing style of the Humans of New York campaign, I chose to interview and photograph C.A. community members, listening to their self-identified struggles or impactful life experiences. For each of my thirty-six interviewees, I wrote an interpretive piece of poetry or prose from their perspective (in the first person) to empathize with and illustrate their life experience to show that everyone has a story, that everyone goes through ups and downs. To create the bigger picture of our community, I then synthesized all thirty-six stories by taking a couple of lines from each individual written piece to create one single poem: the final tapestry.

This project is my attempt to honor our community as a whole, as well as the various stories and experiences that make our community members human and unique.

One of my favorite parts of this project, and one of the most rewarding, was to see the reactions of people when I showed them their piece and the photo I took of them. It’s an incredible feeling to see their visceral reaction right after they finish reading. They have this look of shock and awe on their face. They feel that their struggle or experience is recognized and acknowledged, that they have been heard and they have been understood. Some people cried and some people asked me for a hug when they read their piece and told me it truly captured exactly how they felt, the emotions they went through, and they felt understood, important, significant. It meant so much to me that their piece meant a lot to them because I wanted them to know that their story mattered.

The bottom line of my project is this: I loved it for the amount of emotional connection, empathy, and thought that came with truly listening to and doing justice to another person’s story. I walked out of this project feeling more personally connected with those around me and even more in awe of how amazingly similar, yet unique every individual is. The other day, I saw this quote in the library that I think fully embodies the ultimate takeaway for this project, and the reason why I chose to title it Of Common Threads:

“America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.” –Ralph Ellison

Through my project, I hope that each individual strand, as well as the entire tapestry, can speak to the diversity and richness of the community we have at Cary Academy and beyond.