A Library of Many Labels

I’ve been thinking a lot about labels, and how the world hands them out like party favors. It keeps insisting we pick one before the music stops playing. I often contemplate how half the time, the ones we’re given don’t even feel like they fit. Too tight, too itchy, wrong vibe. Like someone slapped a sticker on me in the dark and called it destiny.

Labels are personal choices, not community property. They’re not up for public vote. They’re names we grow into, grow out of, or hold just for a season because it feels nice. They’re signposts, not cages.

A big part of that realization came from really getting to know my children. Watching them name themselves with this soft steady courage, cracked something open in me. They showed me that identity isn’t a checklist, it’s a living thing. A shifting constellation. A dance between truth and becoming. They told me who they were, and I listened and learned to see life through their eyes.

As they started to figure out what feels right for them, I began to notice what felt right for me. I realized something surprising and beautiful from the truths they declared for themselves.

The labels I feel most at home in don’t cling to my human, they shimmer around my soul. Some identities live in the bones, yes. But others live in the breath, the space between inhale and exhale. In that quiet place where language kneels before truth. Not in submission, but in surrender.

My kids taught me that labels can be poetic little flags we raise, so the world knows how to meet us gently. (Even if they are too trapped in fear to understand how to do that) And once I saw it that way, I started to understand myself in a new light.

The parts of me that defy tidy boxes. The parts that won’t shrink for anyone’s comfort. The parts that feel too cosmic to be captured by a checkbox on a form. Those are the parts that I get to define for myself… or not. They are not offerings for someone else’s opinions or ideas. I am not defining myself for someone else’s understanding. My labels are for my comfort in knowing who and what I am, for myself.

I’m allowed to define myself.

I’m allowed to undefine myself.

I’m allowed to carry soul-shaped labels that evolve as I do.

Because the human I walk around in?

That’s only the first chapter.

The soul beneath it?

That’s the whole library.