You Can Label Your Clothes, You Can Label Your Food, But Labeling Yourself is of No Use.
One year ago in March I was being helped by a fantastic team of psychiatrists at a great inpatient psychiatry unit in New York City's upper east side. Every day I was given personal insights or asked questions to help me find myself and when one is isolated from the world the labels of a small community makes sense, yet grasping this new wisdom and staying true to it is much harder once you face the outside world.
For days I beamed from ear to ear because of new found confidence, new techniques to achieve goals, the group sessions that made me think I will stay sober forever, and how I will tell my family (even the conservative ones) how much of a Queer I am. I had been so confined and isolated, only excited by simple things like getting two pizzas for lunch instead of one. 40mg of Prozac and 20mg of Adderall can make your brain explode with ideas, positivity, and fill up three notebooks' worth of ideas.
Then the day comes, I'm told I have 72 hours before I leave. I think I'll miss this actually, even the person who doesn't ever stop screaming, or the ghosts who pace the halls grasping for some energy after a round of ECT. I'll miss the structure, how easy sobriety is here, the support, and feeling like I was actually 'normal' here.
I always wondered what the baby feels like as it is about to be born, when I was stepping away from that hospital campus, I think I felt it. A spiritual re-birth, if you will.
As I stepped out with my sister, clutching the big water mug I kept as a souvenir, my eyes burned, I felt weak instantly. I cried right there outside of the hospital, and moments later when my sister brought me to my feet and walked in step with me; there was not one mention of the ordeal of the past month or so, or spending her birthday visiting me there.
You came here to read about my abandonment of labels though and so I guess I can start with my first diary entry in the ward:
Today I want to get inside my own mind instead of in to others, today I want to isolate myself and try to piece more of my scattered life together and today I am having a breakthrough. I think I realized today that we should blame the Tower of Babel for all of our woes. What it is is that I have based my life on labels, and that we as humans base our lives on labels as well. On disease, medication, orientation, gender, dependency, maturity, and age--these are ironically things that society and employers state they do not discriminate against. Ha.
But they do. And this leads us to ask ourselves so many questions which we may not be prepared to answer. Even me, I am just getting used to the fact that I am a human being, just that. Human. That's what all of us are. Mistakes, success, growth, discussion, the moments we breathe in and out, those are all that defines me. Human.
So, I won't be your notes, your pill, your prisoner, and my mind will be released. Our minds were meant to be label free.
Let this traumatized, Gay, Gender Queer Female and 22 year old Jew with PTSD, Depression, Anxiety, and many other issues as labeled by doctors tell or teach you why that doctor's label put on my birth certificate led me to this ward.
And so I continue with this discussion on labels or boxes, both of which remind me of things we store as opposed to things we constantly carry around:
Growing up in Ohio, I was a tomboy, wearing a Michael Jordan uniform until it didn't fit, a tux that my mom got for me to a wedding, and a red ball cap to conceal my hair when I went to play baseball or football with the boys. My first card for a crush was a flower that the girl told me was ugly and threw away when I was 5 years old... My mom thought I was dapper, not pretty, my friends used the same term--to them I was Beks. To myself, I didn't know how I felt about anything except that I wanted to be normal and get asked by a cute boy to the roller skating party.
After working for a cruise ship for a couple years while coming in to my own and coming to terms with being gay, I left and moved to New York City.
When I went to my first "Queer" party I got bombarded with the question of what type of "Queer" or "Lesbian" I was... I just knew I liked girls. Then I heard someone use the term GenderQueer and gender neutral and, upon weeks of research, I realized that was how I wanted to label myself from that point on. From that point forward, I found that I needed more labels, more things to be able to define myself as, more "discoveries".
More confusion.
So, you're a New Yorker, Hispanic, a Canadian, girl, boy, Jewish, Christian, heterosexual, pansexual, transgender, gender neutral, white, black, purple, and so on. You're defining yourself, you're allowing others to set that pressure on themselves. Boys can't be princesses, flower girls can't wear a suit, I can't cut my hair too short at work because of one checkbox.
Songs have been sung, books written, plays performed, and all with this one moral: "Be yourself." When you have so many characters that fall under so many labels that are not necessary, personality trait, physical traits, dialects, go ahead and write them in. One day my children will not shop by barriers of gender and be able to get toys and clothes they like, they will not be judged for their first crush being scientifically assigned the same gender as them at birth or judge further when the other kid likes them back, I won't have to explain what it means to "come out", and I won't have to be asked to go to the opposite side of a store to try on mens clothing in the women's fitting rooms only to be told to go back to the mens side amidst their confusion.
We all wear these tags that make us feel more "ourselves"... but if we weren't linked to them, if we never had them at all, would we worry about adhering to them and be any different?
It's been a year, and I've gone tagless.
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