What I Be: Security in insecurity

Telling their  stories the way they  want it to be told. Building security through insecurities. One photographer has managed to create a community that showcases people’s biggest self-doubts, but also brings them together and lets them know that they are not alone in their struggles. Steve Rosenfield travels across the United States, working with different organizations to combat insecurities and stereotypes. The message is deep, but the method is simple: all it takes is a sharpie and a camera.

This year, more than 60 Toreros participated in the What I Be Project. Rosenfield invited students to write their greatest insecurity on their skin with a pen and stare into the lens for a powerful headshot. In addition, the participant comes up with a statement to go with their photo, structured as, “I am not my ___.”

Junior Robert Tyler Warren, known to many as Tyler Warren, is a face that Toreros may recognize on campus. As Associated Students’ Speaker of the Senate, Warren is often seen at events around campus and can be found spending most of his time on the third floor of the SLP. Despite his calm and eloquently spoken persona, Warren has faced struggles throughout his life.

Warren knew about the What I Be Project for the past two years and although it appeared intriguing,  he was never interested in participating. After dealing with intense personal issues with his family and romantic relationship, Warren decided he wanted to open up to someone about his life. But instead of talking to his closest friends or family, he decided to open up to a stranger.

“This semester I went through some stuff recently over summer, intersession, and I finally felt ready to talk about some things with someone that I didn’t know,” Warren said. “With this individual (Rosenfield) coming here, knowing that he speaks with all these people, I feel like he could provide me with insight that my friends and family, and people I was close to, couldn’t tell me. That was definitely a motivating factor.”

For the past two years, Warren knew he had insecurities, just like everyone else. However, he could not point them out, instead choosing to put up a wall and pretend like nothing was wrong. After seeing the format of the What I Be Project, Warren thought it would be a perfect way to define the insecurities he could never quite name before.

“Going through all of that stuff recently, my five-year relationship ended over intersession, and my family hasn’t been doing the greatest, but I still convinced myself that I was strong in the moment,” Warren said. “I knew that maybe there was something I was hiding. So I didn’t know what my insecurities were in that regard. Something that I couldn’t see myself but knew was there, so having him point to it.”

During the process of taking the picture for the What I Be Project, each student spends time alone with Rosenfield to discuss their stories and what they might want written on their skin. Warren spent over an hour with Rosenfield, and their long conversation made Warren rethink the source and origin of his insecurities. After telling Rosenfield his life story, Warren was surprised when Rosenfield told him that although his story was great, it did not actually tell him anything about Warren himself.

“So that was a major turning point in the interview,” Warren said. “My whole life, I viewed (my story) as something that shaped me, but I didn’t view it as something that came with issues that I’ve been suppressing. And that’s what ended up coming out.”

Warren explained how Rosenfield pushed him to explore his insecurities, but still let him discover them for himself as well.

“He didn’t necessarily help me along the process, he just kept pushing me and made me figure it out myself,” Warren said. “And after all of that, figuring out that it was my story, but that it wasn’t necessarily mine. And my story was that it messed me up. It made me have abandonment issues. It made me feel like I was always alone. Because I lost that childhood experience, my innocence, I was forced to mature too quickly.”

Warren commented on how he finally developed his statement.

“And my statement of ‘I am not my composure,’ people always comment and talk about, ‘You always seem well-spoken, you always seem put together, you dress nicely, you speak so eloquently, everything seems to be going well,’” Warren said. “But (Rosenfield) helped me realize that I put that up as a wall, because I don’t want to show the sensitive side that I’m broken. There’s a lot of parts of me that are broken. And I didn’t know that. And at this point I think I’ve convinced myself that that was me, and that I could suppress that and move forward.”

Although Warren was forced to look at his life experiences in a completely different light, getting his picture taken by Rosenfield felt like a heavy weight was being taken off his chest.

“When he took that picture, it was alleviated in a way,” Warren said. “He wrote the words on my face and it was a binding seal of recognition for myself that those were the defining characteristics of my story until I didn’t realize until that point. And moving forward, those are not only the things I can carry forward with me now, but take those experiences to empower me to address them and to also use them as strength and not as insecurities.”

As someone who is often in the public eye and open for scrutiny at USD, Warren believes he has faced his fair share of criticism from the community, but that he has chosen to ignore it in the past.

“Being here for three years, there’s several people on campus that have assumptions about me,” Warren said. “And I would say pretty negative assumptions. They’ve assigned different labels to me, and decided that it’s not worth talking to me or getting to know me because they view me negatively. It never bothered me in the past, I was fine with it. People can assume what they want, it’s not my place to go out there and try to convince them. It’s just not my place.”

However, by sending his What I Be picture out into the public, he hopes some of the negative assumptions that people hold about him can be diminished.

“But sending it out to the public, it helped me, because those people who don’t want to know about me — now they know,” Warren said. “And if they had seen that, they can understand some things now. And those assumptions that they made can only be invalidated, in my opinion. And that’s good for me, because it meant I could move past that in a way.”

Publishing the picture helped Warren individually in negating negative stereotypes, but he also realized that there are more people in the world that struggle with the same issues as him. He hopes that his photo can affect others in the same way it helped him.

“It made me realize that this is actually a very common theme in our society now,” Warren said. “Putting up walls and fighting what’s broken about you. It’s because we live in a culture where you have to seem like everything’s okay. But that’s not the same for me anymore, especially after this experience. It’s okay to feel vulnerable to people. And it’s okay to open up yourself to be sensitive to people. You don’t need to let stigmas or cultural establishments restrict you from being a human being and empathizing.”

Warren’s career as the Associated Students’ Speaker of the Senate will continue next year. Although he will continue to face struggles, insecurities, and scrutiny from others, his What I Be photo will remain — reminding everyone that no matter what someone looks like from the outside, no one can be perfect.