What resists measure - by Ashley Zhang - Soft Power

A few months into dating my boyfriend, I told him that I do not wish to be loved for being good, but for being me. I couldn’t quite articulate what I meant at the time, to his exasperation and mine, but I think it was this: I wish to be loved not for particular virtues or accomplishments, but for my entirety: my ambitions and appetites, my curiosities and contradictions, my fears and foibles, my warmth and will. From early in my life, and for many years, I felt flattened by a society that seemed to view me not as a whole person, but as a collection of traits to be measured and ranked: assessing intelligence through standardized test scores, determining desirability through dating app matches, evaluating performance through productivity metrics. Though this flattening makes us legible, it erodes the particularities that make us human. More insidiously, it narrows our sense of possibility — both for our individual lives and our shared future. When we reduce our worth to narrow metrics of

A few months into dating my boyfriend, I told him that I do not wish to be loved for being good, but for being me. I couldn’t quite articulate what I meant at the time, to his exasperation and mine, but I think it was this: I wish to be loved not for particular virtues or accomplishments, but for my entirety: my ambitions and appetites, my curiosities and contradictions, my fears and foibles, my warmth and will. From early in my life, and for many years, I felt flattened by a society that seemed to view me not as a whole person, but as a collection of traits to be measured and ranked: assessin