Prologue: A Life Of Labels

I’m told that I did not speak until I was four years old. That’s not true, but that was the narrative. Maybe I didn’t speak when it was expected. But I spoke. People just didn’t seem to listen or truly hear or see me.

My identity was decided for me at a young age. I was named before I was known. Who I was and who I should become. I was spoken about as if I was not in the room. Objectified, as if I was not real.

I was being assigned roles for a life I ultimately realized I didn’t want. A life to be lived for the benefit of others. Before I even had the proper words to process, I was being sculpted into a shape that made sense to other people. To other people who didn’t even know me.

The good girl. The easygoing one. The quiet one.

The messages were everywhere. Some spoken aloud, others carved silently into the walls of my childhood home.

“She’s so sensitive….”

“She’s not like the others...”

“She’s really sweet, but...”

I became fluent in reading between the lines. The words spoken about me were not the truth, but they became my truth because they were repeated, because they were believed.

In those early years, I internalized all of this more than anyone realized. The compliments that felt like corrections. The criticisms hidden in concern. The glances, the sighs, the jokes made at my expense. All these stray comments were tallies on my nervous system.

“Maybe she’s adopted… no one looks like her.”

“She’s so much more petite than the rest of her family.”

“I don’t know why she’s not as smart as the rest of the family. At least she’s pretty.”

I began to shape myself around their expectations, shrinking or stretching to fit the space I was given.

Overt or implicit, the labels all carried weight. Over time, the definitions of me created by those who claimed to know me better than I knew myself began to override the truth. Who did I think I was when I was a child because of the mixed messages?

Slow.

Smart.

Performer.

Submissive.

Shy.

Black Sheep.

Shameful.

Tennis Player.

Lawyer.

Fat.

Thin.

Pretty.

Unlovable.

Sensitive.

Helpless.

Mother.

Good.

I carried these labels and contradictions quietly, and I figured out that the safest response was to smile. I learned how to wear that smile like armor. A smile so convincing that people didn’t probe under the surface. Ask me how I was doing, and my answer would be “fine” with a pleasant smile. I wanted to ensure that no further questions were asked.

But behind the smile, I hoarded every contradiction, every discomfort, every version of myself I wasn’t allowed to be. I became fluent in the art of appeasement.

And it worked. For a very long time.

I carried these roles well into adulthood. Through school, through jobs, through relationships. I learned how to bend without breaking. I said yes when I meant no. I stayed quiet when I wanted to scream.

For a long time, that was enough. Or at least, it seemed like enough.

I held the façade together until it cracked when I turned 40 and I realized that I was miserable.

Not ungrateful. But lost and miserable.

Because by thirty, I had surpassed the career goals I had set.

By thirty-five, I was searching for new ways to feed a fire that was already dimming.

By forty, the fire had gone out and I was trying to revive the embers.

I had the dream life on paper: I was married, had a big house, two wonderful kids, and a long list of professional accolades. But a lot of it felt hollow.

I had been married^[1] for eighteen years to someone who never really saw or understood me. I thought I was so mature when I got married at twenty-two because, well, I felt like I had already lived a lifetime by then. He threw me a surprise fortieth birthday party, and I was surrounded by wonderful people who each saw slivers of me. I had been showing fragments of myself. Convenient parts curated for whoever stood in front of me.

Everything eventually fell apart as I finally claimed myself and clawed my way into my present life.

Staying would have cost me myself. If I didn’t change, I would model disappearance as a form of success, masking it as stability.

It wasn’t a midlife crisis. That would be cliché.

And it didn’t happen all at once. Eventually, the smile stopped fitting. The story I had lived slowly no longer sounded or felt like my own. I was surrounded by the life I was supposed to want. The life that anyone would want. The picture-perfect family growing up, followed by the picture-perfect marriage and family life once again.

While it was a life that looked great on the outside, it was a mess behind closed doors.

There’s a particular kind of emptiness that comes from having everything you’re supposed to want, and still feeling… lost and empty.

It wasn’t just sadness. It was misery. A dull ache that stretched through my days and pooled in the silence of my nights. I would lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, wondering how I had gotten so far from myself without even noticing.

Forty years of living behind a mask, and I finally asked myself a question I hadn’t asked myself before:

Who am I, really, without the narrative imposed by other people?

Or, more honestly, what happens if I stop living with the names other people gave me?

If I was being honest with myself, I had not tried to figure out the answer to that question before. But I was ready.

Not because I was brave, but because I had no other choice. Because the mask had become too heavy. Because the armor had started to rust. And because, deep down, I suspected that there had always been a powerful voice inside me. Deep down I knew there was more than running on auto pilot. Deep down I knew that there was more to life.

This is the story of what happened when I started filtering out the noise and started re-discovering my voice.

This is not a story about becoming someone new. It’s the story about finally stopping the performance of who I was not meant to be.

I didn’t find my voice in one dramatic moment. There was no moment of clarity, no scene where I rose up and declared myself to the world. It was slower than that. At first, it showed up as restlessness. A feeling of irritation when someone repeated an old label about me. An internal whisper of rebellion when I agreed to something I didn’t want to do. The tiniest of cracks in the façade.

I began, almost imperceptibly, to experiment with not being the person I was told to be. Saying no to small things. And then saying no to larger things. Being more direct. Telling people how I really felt instead of just being “fine.”

Letting my life be messy.

Letting silence or a frown hang where a placating smile would normally go.

Letting society be disappointed with me. It felt dangerous, but it also felt glorious.

Then, slowly, the pieces began to fall into place. I realized that I was stronger than I thought I was all along. I remembered parts of me as a young child moving with love. I remembered my toddler self, exploring the streets of Los Angeles alone. I remembered teaching myself to read and write in two languages before I was tall enough to reach a water fountain. I remembered moving across the world alone during college and discovering my French was worse than I thought yet still finding my footing and by the time I left, speaking fluently. I remembered that every major job I’d ever had wasn’t from an opening I applied to, but from a position I carved out and insisted the company create for me.

These memories came back not as random recollections but as proof. Proof that these labels were not necessarily destinies but challenges for me to accept, refine, defy, or reimagine. Proof that I had always been capable, self-directed, curious, and bold even when the world or I didn’t recognize it. And, more importantly, I didn’t need the world’s recognition. I just needed my own.

With each memory, a fragment of my true voice returned to me. I started to question not only the labels others gave me but also the ones I’d repeated to myself. Maybe “slow” was deliberate. Maybe “quiet” was observant. What if the some of traits I’d been shamed for were the very traits that made me rare? What if I re-wrote the inner dialogue and stopped calling it shaming and instead called it boundaries? Or, more importantly, what if I stopped caring about the noise caused by others and just lived my life on my own terms?

I realized that while people gave me labels, I allowed them to do it and didn’t do anything about it. Maybe the most difficult part to accept is that I stopped questioning who I really was and started accepting who everyone else decided I should be.

Some moments have felt easy, while others felt disorienting. I haven’t always felt I was on the right path or surrounding myself with the right people. But I have felt like I have been moving toward myself, not away.

And slowly, I began to fill my life with my own words instead of inherited ones. I wrote. I spoke up. I not only owned my fear, I embraced it. I practiced telling the truth even when my voice shook. I allowed myself to take up space.

We all have our inner worlds, and I don’t think anyone’s inner and outer worlds completely match. I realized that my self-view shifts depending on how I feel, and it’s often different from how others perceive me. At this point in my life, people say things like:

“You’re the strongest person I know.”

“You’re a badass.”

“You have your shit together.”

“You’re really confident.”

“You always land on your feet.”

“You’re a born leader.”

But inside, sometimes, aside from having my shit together, I don’t feel like some of those things.

So many parts of my story are not unique to me. I’ve noticed how common parts of my story are especially among women, immigrants, first-generation Americans, professionals in general, and anyone whose identity has been split between cultures or roles or expectations.

If you’ve ever been praised into silence, if you’ve had successes but they felt hollow, or been labeled so early you didn’t question it – this story is for you too.

In reclaiming myself, I stopped seeing my childhood and young adult life as a collection of traumas and started seeing it as training. Not training in the toxic sense, but training in sensitivity, awareness, intuition, and resilience. All those years of holding contradictions, of reading between the lines, of surviving unspoken rules? They had forged a deep sensitivity, an ability to listen, to notice, to adapt. All those labels that were given to me whether I thought they were fitting or not? They helped me grow by fighting against them or realizing that they aren’t necessary negative. They were gifts in a sense. An opportunity for me to start writing my life.

The more I stepped into that self, the less I needed the armor. Smiles became real again. “Fine” gave way to honest answers. Approval from others became less essential than alignment with myself. More aligned relationships entered my life as a result. This is the work of inhabiting who I am. It’s a journey and I’m far from done.

My life is no longer built on other people’s expectations; it is rooted in my own knowing. For the first time I live my life on my own terms.

Who am I?

I am not the words that tried to contain me.

I am not the roles I played to stay safe.

I am not the labels people gave me.

I am Undefined.

.

^[1] The reasons for my divorce are complex. I will not be discussing this relationship in this book.