When people think about covering, they don’t associate it with something that takes place across all groups in some form. Someone may cover having grown up in poverty, a deaf person may not mention their disability, and a trans person may avoid using the bathroom in certain spaces.
I recently had the chance to talk to Serenity Wright, the Associate Director of Social Innovation at the University of Kentucky, about where she saw covering present in her life, some of the roots it stemmed from, and how she has been processing it and uncovering parts of herself at work and home.
We started with covering – downplaying, hiding, or filtering parts of ourselves at work, with different social groups, at school, or with family.
Serenity shared that there was a “critical moment in time for me that truly shaped a lot of how I choose to cover and why. I'm bi-racial, and my dad is Chinese-Indonesian. I was raised in Indonesia until I was about 16. The high school I went to when we came back here (to the United States) seemed very excited about having me as a student, very intrigued that I was an international and diverse student. I had a particular experience with an English teacher; she said, ‘You'll bring so much to the class.’ I really felt like her classroom would be a safe space for me. But it could not have been more of an opposite experience. There was so much I didn’t understand. She would say, ‘You don't know because -- You're not from here (or) English is your second language. You'll need to skip recess to learn what’s missing. It was all grounded in lived experience. For years I didn't talk about it.”
She described how those early experiences shaped how and what she shared of herself at school and in her years as a public school teacher because of limitations with language, early education, and understanding things like using a computer and navigating a syllabus.
Serenity said, “I stood naked in that classroom and then promptly put on a winter parka [to cover]. It took me a really long time to take it off, and to own who I was and how it [cultural experiences] impacted what I learned and what I understood.”
I shared that I was homeschooled until 10th grade, and I’d started to go to school for some of the same reasons Serenity returned to the United States to finish high school. I didn’t feel like I was being prepared for what was expected of me in college – the essays, tests, collaborative projects, the cultural expectations. And while different, we both had domains of knowledge missing as we entered high school. While my math was on track and my reading ability was at the college level, my geography and historical knowledge were seriously lacking. Also lacking was a deep understanding of grammar, something Serenity related to. We structured our sentences based on what we’d read and heard and what sounded right.
“I teach my children Mandarin,” she said. “I grew up speaking Mandarin and Bahasa, but never got formal language training in any language I speak, including English. It wasn’t until a couple months ago when my son got so frustrated about the difference in syntax, that I realized I couldn’t explain it. Written language has always been a concern – it’s something I’m never confident in.”
So how did those experiences translate to the workplace?
“I never discussed it [growing up in Indonesia and the cultural differences] in my first professional space where I was a public-school teacher for years,” Serenity said. “The principal knew about my upbringing, he was my safe space because he knew my family.”
However, things evolved as she entered higher education and saw how her early frustrations and experiences could shape how she served students. “I leveraged that experience to inform how I supported international students or students from smaller counties. The coping mechanism and struggles were very similar just from different lenses.”
Through her experiences during COVID-19, the rise in hate crimes again the Asian community, and through self-reflection, Serenity found that “it took seeing, feeling, and experiencing leadership that truly supported me in all facets without it being done in an exposing or token kind of way for me to own the experience myself,” she said. “Through that process, I've been able to uncover for me as opposed to uncovering for someone else.
Creating different ways of working with colleagues can also mean speaking up for yourself and explaining how you work or process information that may not be visible. “I once had a boss who I felt kept interrupting me when I paused,” she said. “I finally told him, ‘I am filtering through three languages in my head so you can be patient as I get my words right because you'll pick them apart if I don't.’ I'm overly conscious of what I'm communicating and how you will receive it and your perception of and experience with me. It comes out more at work but comes out across all areas of life.”
Serenity is one of those people whose smile makes you immediately feel comfortable. After two hours of conversation, we ended our time together with a question from her about some of the language I used in my Uncovering Your Value keynote. She said, “One of the pieces I found most interesting was that people should have choice/agency in how they show up.
So, is it about showing up as much as possible or about their personal choice? How does the possible impact choice?”
When I talk about covering in the workplace, the culture should support people feeling safe and secure enough to bring as much of themselves into the workplace as possible. For me, that’s connected to how I dress, carry and present myself. For others, it might be sharing that they hung out with their grandkids over the weekend or, like Serenity, are translating across multiple languages at any given time. From the individual side, it’s about choice and agency. Do I want to share this part of myself with my colleagues or a client? If the trust and sense of belonging are there, I believe it’s a choice within what is possible. I’m not advocating that a company require people to reveal all their deepest secrets; what I think is important is that individuals can bring and share the parts of themselves that positively impact their work, their relationships with colleagues, and their overall health and wellbeing.
If what Serenity and I discussed resonates with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts, experiences, or additional questions! Please send me a DM or email connect@joshmiller.ventures to delve deeper into this topic with me.
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About: Josh Miller is a queer changemaker, public speaker, photographer, and outdoor explorer. He is the owner of Josh Miller Ventures and the co-founder + CEO of IDEAS xLab—an organization that uses the art of storytelling and community collaboration to impact public health. Miller’s work has been featured by The New York Times, the Aspen Institute, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He is a Soros Equality Fellow, received the 2022 Nonprofit Visionary Leader Award from Louisville Business First, and was selected for Business Equality Magazine’s Forty LGBTQ+ Leaders under 40 and Louisville Business First's Forty under 40. Miller is a two-time TEDx speaker and has been described as a "force in our community.” He holds an MBA from Indiana University and an undergraduate degree from Bellarmine University. Previously, he served as an advisor to the Derby Diversity & Business Summit and co-chair for the Louisville Health advisory board’s communications committee.