Ignoring the Labels

In November 2024 I listened as my cousin eloquently eulogized my mother at her funeral. It was a lovely speech, but it was not my mother’s story. It was a curated version of her life. The life she lived on the outside, much of which was told to others in a distilled version.

Moments before he started speaking, my uncle invited me to speak. I had long ago been unofficially designated both the family spokesperson and historian. I had eulogized my father decades before in a scene that brought not only family members, but the community at-large, to tears. But in eulogizing him I didn’t just tell the story of my father as the world knew him, I told the story of who he was. Because every day of his life he refused to be caged by society’s expectations of him. My father had no mold.

I declined the invitation from my uncle, leaving my mother's funeral as quietly as I came in. Quiet was the way my family saw me and still sees me. Not just the quiet one. But the slow one, the incapable one. The disappointment. And finally that day in November 2024 I became okay with how my family sees me, because I now embody my truth and that is enough for me.

I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always ok letting people believe what they wanted to believe about me. For most of my life, peoples’ beliefs and expectations of me operated as both a cage and a guide for my life.

But all of that had slowly come to a halt a few years before my mother’s death. I had started letting my family, and then society become disappointed in me. Because what I stood to lose and was actually losing, were far greater than that.

I was losing pieces of myself. I didn’t know who I was without all of the labels that others had created for me.

Families are where most of our labels begin. Some are given lovingly. Some casually. Some in frustration. Some without anyone realizing how long they will stick.

Sometimes these labels are spoken aloud. Sometimes they are simply understood. They are repeated in glances, expectations, and roles we slip into so easily that they feel inevitable.

And once assigned, they become shorthand. Families repeat them until they harden into identity.

Over time, we don’t just hear the labels. We live them.

And what begins inside our families doesn’t stay there.

We carry those identities into classrooms, friendships, careers, relationships, and marriages. Into the way we love. Into the choices we think we’re allowed to make.

Until one day, if we’re lucky — or unlucky — something breaks.

A loss. A failure. A health crisis. A career collapse. A divorce.

Or we look at ourselves and realize that the life that we built suddenly feels unfamiliar.

And we’re forced to ask a question most of us spend years avoiding: Who am I without the labels imposed by other people?