Chaitra Week #3 - Between The Lines

Chaitra Ambati

Mrs. Smith

English 11AP

23 September 2026 


Chaitra Week #3 -  Between The Lines

 

Every interview, every icebreaker, I am posed with the recurring question: "List three words that describe you." And every interview, every icebreaker, I stare into the intense eyes glaring back at me, the blank-lined flashcard lying on the cold desk in front of me, wishing I had a definite answer. 


Three words–how can I possibly summarize myself into three words? I can hardly compress my thoughts into 500 words for this blog! 


The root of this dilemma must be running through everyone's mind, right? Right… I think to myself as kids are getting up to turn their flashcards in. Meanwhile, the interviewer must be bored out of their mind watching me blankly stare through their half-curious, half-exhausted eyes. (True story by the way). 


I look down and scribble some random words onto my blank- lined flashcard. I blubber some words in an uneasy, unsure manner and scan the interviewer's face for approval. Whatever. But it's not whatever, is it? 


Something that continues to plague me is the constant expectation that I should know my identity well enough to package myself into three words. Three words that tell the world exactly who I am, where my values lie, what interests me and makes me smile wide and reveal my teeth.


But as I meet new classmates and see new places every year, it lingers in my mind that perspectives can differ so greatly between people. Like when I play country music in my car and my friend scrunches up her face as I exaggerate my happiness and sing along.


 If the music is the same to our ears, why do our faces suggest different? 


My point is, why trap myself in a box made up of three words? Why not let the people I meet interpret me in their own way? Like a song whose lyrics are unchangeable, I can not expect everyone to understand me. 


After all, it circles back to the same philosophy–our identities are too complex, too multidimensional, to be defined by a mere three words. Maybe who we are is not written on the lines, but somewhere between them–invisible and open to perception. 



https://infinitelyteaching.com/2017/02/27/flashcard-template/

Comments

  1. Yumeng FSeptember 30, 2026 at 7:07 PM

    Hello Chaitra! Thank you for your blog, and I really enjoyed reading it! Your blog stood out to me because of your hook—interviews and icebreakers are something a lot of people, especially teenagers our age and including me, have experienced. So, I think it was very smart to use it in the very beginning of your sentence to captivate the reader’s attention! More than that, I really love how personal all your blogs, including this one, feel. What I love more in this blog specifically is your usage of italicizing, paragraph and sentence length, and different punctuation marks. These elements really all contribute to making your writing feel so authentic and engaging!

    Also, I agree with your philosophy that identities are intricate. Everybody has their own unique backgrounds, personalities and more—trying to fit into a mere description of three words is truly not feasible. I think while the three-word-interviewer strategy can be good for assessing an overall gist of a person for a position, it will never be able to define anybody. With that being said, I think it can be also tied to the saying, “rejection is redirection.” Just as three words can’t define a person, neither can an interview or an icebreaker. I think it is easy to lose faith and confidence when one faces disapproval from another. However, I think it is so important to remember that we are more than just a less-than-an-hour-long assessment of who we are as a person and our capabilities, because just like you said, we are “too complex, too multidimensional”!

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  2. Eli YingSeptember 30, 2026 at 7:26 PM

    Hey Chaitra! I really enjoyed reading your blog, especially because of how much I relate to the message you’re trying to send. I agree with your concerns—how can we be expected to provide a comprehensive description of our identities with as little as three words? With all the complexities and even small nuances in everybody’s identities, I wouldn’t know where to even begin. Like you, I also feel irked whenever someone asks me to briefly describe myself, or if the question appears on a worksheet or questionnaire, simply because I don’t know how to fully package myself into a few short sentences. It must have been even more nerve-wracking for you since this happened during an actual interview! On that note, I really liked how you described the little details about your interview and the interviewer; it clearly conveyed the difficulty of the situation.

    I also thought that your reflection on your own identity was very insightful. In particular, I relate to your struggles with the expectations of knowing our own identities well. Obviously, the one who knows our identities best is ourselves, but I found that I can’t easily come up with a description of myself. When I get asked about my own identity, I always have to think about it carefully before coming up with an answer. Perhaps the difficulty lies in having to describe ourselves comprehensively but concisely at the same time. I liked how you compared this activity to being stuck “in a box,” since it really shows how restricting it is for our complex identities.

    Your comparison of yourself to a song really stuck with me, too. I think this is truly a great and accurate way to describe identity—everyone can have their own interpretations on a song’s lyrics, and some may not even understand them. Like identity, it’s hard to summarize a song with so many different possible meanings. Thanks for sharing this insightful blog with us, Chaitra!

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  3. Nidhi SrivatsanSeptember 30, 2026 at 9:07 PM

    Hi Chaitra! Your blog was incredibly insightful. The way you structured the sentences in groups of one or two instead of having them in big paragraphs caught my eye and made your writing flow in a very engaging way. Your use of italicized phrases to include your thoughts was a really cool addition too.
    I fully understand how you feel about that specific type of icebreaker — it’s caused me a lot of frustration as well. It is really hard to capture your identity in only three words, and I have often wondered why that icebreaker became so popular. Your comments at the end of the post about our identities being too complex and multidimensional to be defined in short phrases was very insightful and really made me think further about the how we can choose to define our identities when asked.

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