Personal Labels Do More Harm than Good

April 28, 2009

“I am a woman above everything else.” (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis)

I hate to admit this, but I spent a good twenty years wishing I could be someone else… ANYone else. I wanted to be thought of as mesmerizing, noble, admirable, witty, charming, wonderful, spectacular… the list of labels I wanted for myself was endless.

I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, some which I dare not repeat here for fear of making sailors blush. Most of the time I didn’t pay any attention to labels others used to describe me. I could just let them go in one ear and out the other. But a few of them lingered long after the words had been spoken and the painful silence had taken their place. 

Those labels remained not because they were true, but because I believed them, and continued to hear them repeated in my head. I wrote about this process a while ago in my brief post, Personal Propaganda.

I believe using labels to describe ourselves, our children, our loved ones, or others is dangerous business and to be avoided at all costs. The reason for this is we (humans) have a few self-sabotaging tendencies that give those labels too much power: we doubt ourselves, we tend to fit things into categories, we assume the worst, we feel not good enough, and we cling to any available excuse to justify our failures. Using labels, even when we think they are compliments, can often cause a lasting, haunting impression.

To prove this point, I would like to share with you the three labels that tortured me most insidiously from the time I was a little girl until a couple of years ago: The Smart One, The Goddess of the Universe, and Most Likely To Succeed. I know, it sounds a little like the old job interview question, “What’s your greatest weakness?” To which we all reply some version of, “I’m too devoted to my work.” But it’s true; stick with me on this as I show you the trouble I ran into with each of these labels.

1.  The Smart One – This is how my dad used to refer to me, ever since I was in elementary school. Just to give you a little context: I’m one of four kids. I believe what my dad was attempting to do was to find something that was great about each of us, and highlight that, so that we would feel like he was proud of us. My brother was… well, a boy, and for some sick twisted reason this is the greatest thing a kid can be in many societies. (Don’t even get me started on that issue.) So that left my two sisters and me. 

The youngest was blonde, with green eyes, which was a big deal in Costa Rica. She was also born in Venezuela, which was where many of the Miss Universe winners were from in those days (no idea why?) So… she got to be “The Pretty One.” My older sister, though beautiful in her own right, was best known for being super-sweet, innocent, kind, and polite. She got to be “The Nice One,” or sometimes, “The Sweet One.” Either way, same thing.

I was the middle daughter and excelled in school; I have a certain aptitude for learning just about anything. So I got to be “The Smart One,” which sounds like a pretty nice compliment. But this is where the crazy way our brain works comes in: what I inferred from that was that I was neither pretty, nor sweet, and should, therefore, focus on my intellectual achievements (since that’s pretty much all I have going for me). 

Clearly, my dad never intended THIS outcome from his compliments; he was just trying to make us feel good about ourselves. But, as Anne Sexton famously said, “It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”

When he assigned these labels, we each felt we had to live up to them, embrace them, and become them. This, we assumed, was the way to make him proud. The interpretation that kept replaying in my head for, literally, decades after that, was that I’m really never going to be good enough for someone to love or marry, right? I mean, guys marry the pretty ones, the nice ones, not the difficult-to-be-around, smarty-pants ones. 

I convinced myself that no one would ever marry me, and set myself on a path of dating losers (who would reaffirm what I believed), and complete over-achievement and perfectionism (to make up for the many things I was lacking).  One day, maybe, I’ll tell you about those days… it’s exhausting for me to even think about how much I was trying to achieve. But you get the idea: what started as a “good label” ended up, unintentionally, being a psychological burden.

2.  The Goddess Of The Universe – This one came about somewhere around 6th or 7th grade; my paternal grandmother used this phrase to describe me all the time. She paid very little attention to my siblings (which was fine by me, because they already had the better labels from my point of view) but always made it a point to be in touch with me, send me little gifts, ask about me, and remind everyone that I was a goddess. I was loving this because, who among us doesn’t want to feel “special,” right?

“The stuff of mere mortals doesn’t apply to ME, because I am a goddess.”

“I wasn’t meant to marry because I need to save the universe. ”

I wanted to believe I was a reincarnation of Isis, or any other super-cool goddess. I was feeling pretty good about that label justifying anything else that made me feel weird or deficient in some way. I put a whole lot of stock into the belief that being a goddess would make up for everything else. 

That is, until I was old enough to realize that my grandma was paranoid schizophrenic. In fact, she was institutionalized for a significant portion of her life. She thought I was a goddess, but she also thought aliens were reading her mind and plotting to come destroy the Earth (unless, that is, I could save us, I assume).

“Great,” I thought. “That’s just great.” Here I thought she was clairvoyant, or something, and could sense my extraordinary divinity, when she was really just delusional… and I mean REALLY delusional (not like we throw that word around nowadays). She was hearing voices and seeing hallucinations, and could not function in the real world.  So then I concluded, I’m not special at all. In fact, I’m not even that smart, if I believed that load of crap to begin with!

3.  Most Likely To Succeed – By the time I got to high school, I was pretty well convinced that my only hope in life was to do well academically; and boy did I. When I was a senior, and Valedictorian of a class of 440 students, they voted me Most Likely To Succeed. I figured they were probably right about that. 

I was going off into the world to claim my success… but what is success? I never defined it for myself; so I never got there. Or, if I did, I never knew it. All I noticed were those around me who were infinitely more successful in every conceivable way. I was a failure; and this was particularly pathetic (I thought) because I had showed such promise in my early days. I didn’t live up to the title! I let down every person who believed I was going to make it in this world.

This was supposed to be a totally harmless title, among many that are assigned to seniors just for fun, really. I mean, Best Hair? Best Physique? Most Popular? None of these are supposed to mean anything once we finish our senior year. 

But the thing is, especially when we are talking about kids and teens, who are trying to figure out who they are and who they are not, labels don’t really help at all because we have a natural tendency to assign too much importance to them. We may try to live up to them, or we may try to disprove them. Either way, we’re trying too hard and focusing too much energy on something that is not real and shouldn’t matter.

Please consider that, if these “good” labels caused so much emotional turmoil and distress, what kind of damage do “bad” labels inflict? The words you utter in a moment of anger (or stupidity) may live on in unintended ways long after you have forgotten them.

“Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn’t rush into it.” (Quammen)

By the way, this post was inspired by Identity Crisis, one of the many thought-provoking articles on Porsidan. So if you thought it was too long, blame Jay.  ; )

Do YOU have any personal labels that you struggled with?  Did you live up to them, or overcome them?

Related posts:

1. Growing Up Gay in the Bible Belt
2. Inspiration from Pema Chodron: Everyone and Everything
3. Jackie and Heidi: A Tale of Unlikely Companions

Posted in about me, acceptance, mental health