It’s a pencil
I was preparing for my exams. I'm the kind of person who believes in pasting different types of post-its on my wall—colorful, with underlined text. I also highlight some of them, creating a very colorful display on the wall, showing the different shades of all my pens and sketch pens. One day, I was writing something down. I had already put some post-its on the wall, but then I realized something: my pen, which I'd been using for a week, had written all the material on the wall. Every single note was written with that one black pen. The rest of the wall was empty. The whole wall was covered with different colors of post-its, highlighted with various highlighters, but everything was still written in a single black pen.
I started to feel irritated. I wanted to note down an important table, something I needed to see often so I could memorize it. But then, the pen ran out of ink. I had no black pen left. I found a pencil, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it. It felt like using a pencil would ruin the harmony, as if my wall were a masterpiece—my own version of a Picasso—and the pencil would somehow destroy it.
I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t bring myself to write with a pencil. I often use pencils. Sometimes, when you don’t want to press too hard while writing, pencils are the best. If you're just scribbling ideas or jotting things down, pencils are perfect. But in that moment, I couldn’t use it. Why did it matter so much if I used a pencil? After all, it’s still black ink—okay, a lighter shade of black, more like grey. It’s more than grey, but less than black. It’s a pencil. It can still write the same things. My handwriting wouldn’t change, and the material wouldn’t change either. The only difference would be that it’s a little less black.
But I still couldn’t bring myself to use the pencil. That’s when it hit me—why is it so difficult for us to accept people who are a little less black than us , just a little less.