Lewis | Glen Innes

“It’s always the same people. I’m around people very similar to myself. Can’t really remember the last time I was around somebody very different from myself. I’ve grown up all around Auckland. I would say I probably spent the most amount of time around here, so this is probably my true sort of home.

The most important thing to me is probably, people always say this, but I guess close family and friends, u because no matter where I’ve gone in this city, moving different places, they’re the ones that I’ve always had around. The ones that have always been there for me, and the ones that I’ve always had in my life.

Before I moved here, I used to live on the North Shore. I found that there were quite a lot of people over there who maybe looked similar to me, and acted similarly to me, but we all had our own sort of different views and stuff, which was kind of cool. I guess it was a bit refreshing that even though I was only on the North Shore for a very small amount of time, it was a little bit refreshing to be around, people that had different views on the world, and even just day to day things.

Well up until then I didn’t really know that there were sort of different ideas or different views out there. For the first part of my life, everything was always the same. People were the same. So, when I was over there I learned that there was a lot of diversity out there and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing, that it is quite pleasant, and sometimes very nice to be able to hear from other people about those different sort of views, and be able to learn a bit more, maybe see something from a perspective that you would never otherwise have thought about.

It’s quite important, otherwise I guess you’re kind of stuck. Well, not really stuck, but you just never experience anything different and you never really know if there is anything else out there that you’re missing. So I guess, it might not be the most comfortable thing. Like, it wasn’t really comfortable for me at first, when I was moving out of my little bubble of familiarity, but once I did, I felt it was very eye-opening, being able to just see differences in perspective and sort of compare them and maybe even alter my own a bit.”