Label Me Elmo

I used to love those label-makers when I was a kid.  You know the ones, the big plastic doohickeys with the wheel you spun around to find the letter you wanted.  You spun, squeezed the trigger, spun, squeezed the trigger, and on and on until you had a lovely little embossed strip of thick tape-stuff.  Peel off the backing, and voila!  A label you could stick anywhere!

Turns out, adults love labels too.  But instead of squeezing out tape strips to put on our lunch boxes, we turn to labeling ourselves and each-other.  Married.  Single.  Doctor.  Writer.  Smart.  Dumb.  How convenient it is to know which box to put people in.  The first question out of most people's mouths when they meet a stranger at a party is, "what do you do?"  The person's occupation provides a handy label, by which we think we can tell a great deal about them.  Ooo, they're a teacher so they must be dedicated and poor.  They're a physician so they must be arrogant and rich.  They're a writer so they must live in their pajamas and eat a lot of Hot Pockets.

But what if we are not defined by labels, but by our essence.  This becomes trickier for cocktail-party conversation.  "What is your essence" is a tricky question, and I would wager that most people have not done enough soul-searching to be able to answer it.  Or maybe we can never really answer it, not in words.  In deeds, perhaps, but maybe not even then.  In intention.  In our wishes and thoughts and dreams. In how we treat our partners, our friends, strangers, animals.

I've been told that people let go of labels when they are close to death.  The man who was a cattle farmer and could talk about nothing but livestock his entire life, loses interest in this topic at the end.  He moves beyond the labels and into his essence.  I haven't spent enough time with the dying to tell you whether I've observed this for myself, but it makes sense.  No-one really cares, at the end, how you made your money.  They care who you are. People stop identifying with their labels, and find out what's really inside.

Labels are powerful things.  If you let go of one, another comes right in to replace it.  I discovered this when I was getting ready to leave my career as a physician.  I knew I had to make a change, but my label said "Doctor", and what was I going to do with that?  Every time I tried to peel it off and let go of that label, a huge wave of fear swept in.  What are you going to do?  Who are you going to be? What makes you think you can change your life?  Haven't you read your label?  It took several months (years?) before I summoned up enough courage to rip off that label and actually make a change.  I tried very hard not to put a new label on while the wound from the old one was still so fresh, but that was a challenge.  An exercise in letting go, in just "being". Not easy for a type A who is used to jumping through all the hoops set up in her path. 

Making it even more challenging, I found that people like to project their labels onto us, even as we try to let go of our own.  When I announced I was leaving medicine, every single person wanted to know what I was going to do instead.  Now, I know this is natural human curiosity, but people had a really hard time with the answer, "I don't know".  My mantra became, "I'm going to take some time off to figure that out," but I could see the new labels forming even as the words were leaving my lips.  Unemployed.  Lazy.  Quitter.  Crazy.  Maybe they didn't want to think these things about me - but since I didn't give them another label to take the place of the old one, they gave me whichever one came first to mind.

Now, this isn't entirely true, or fair to the people in my life, or to me for that matter!  I had just as hard of a time refusing a new label.  So usually the second sentence, after I completed my mantra, was, "well, I am going to a conference on medical writing so we'll see...".  I just couldn't leave it at, "I don't know", and I could see the sigh of relief in my listeners too.  "At least she has a plan..."  As it turns out, my "plan" has shifted and changed and I'm now doing something I never thought I would be doing...  but that's how life goes.  I'll leave my new career a mystery for another blog post, just to avoid giving my readers a comfortable label.  Ha!

So the next time I visit my hometown, I'll have to see if my mom still has that old label-maker lying around.  Maybe I can make all-new labels.  Just so I can cut them into bits and scatter them to the wind...