My dilema with “Nutella”

WHAT? A Nutella jar? What is it doing at the beginning of my blog post? Is there a secret meaning, am I joking around? Wait… before you close my blog, let me explain myself.

This is not about Nutella itself, although I really like it. It’s about it’s label. You know how you can put a label on everything. Like this Nutella jar, you can personalize it. In this case it says Oliver. In life we can’t personalize our labels. They are given to us by other people who think that that is who you are. Unlike this Nutella jar, we can’t choose labels ourselves, people write these labels for us.

Sometimes people create mean labels that are completely false. But in my case it was completely different. When people label me, they don’t do it out of meanness. They just do it because it’s what I’m known for. A few weeks ago I had to write about my passions; the problem was that I thought that I had to decimate them, as I have many. So I asked Mr. Bonnici what I should write about and he said, “Tennis, write about that. About how good you feel when you’re playing”. As soon as he said this I started asking myself questions, as I always do. So is this what I am stuck with, tennis?

The truth is I don’t want to be known just for tennis, I want to be known for other things as well; maybe acting, music, being a good person, a whole person, who knows. Sometimes people just label you by the things you do, but I also would like to be known for the kind of person that I am, what I believe is a good person, a good friend, and a person that cares. It’s like people want to shed a spotlight on some area about you, just so they can “know” more about you. What if one thing doesn’t define me? What if I have many (let’s say) talents or things I believe I would like to be known for? I don’t want people to think that the only thing I do is play tennis. I act, I play music, I write, I think deeply, I work extremely hard, I am on multiple clubs I feel passionate about, I play sports.

Just because you do one thing and people “know” you for that sole thing, doesn’t mean you aren’t full of other things. The label people assign you is not always accurate, sometimes you don’t like it. Nowadays, we label muslims as terrorists, but not all muslims are terrorists. Maybe one of them is a humanitarian, but just because muslims are “known” for that when they say that they follow that religion, they are instantly labeled by ignorants.

What I am try to say is: don’t listen to those external labels. Be like that Nutella jar, personalize it. Or don’t even have a label at all. Maybe you can buy a bigger Nutella label to fit all you want to be known for, that’s okay. Labels exist to categorize things, but not people. Be like Kevin, he put his name and 07, we may never know why, but it was purposeful for him. Maybe for you it’s better just to rip off the sticker attached to your head that says “dumb” or “loser”. Do it, life is not about a label you are given, it’s about what other things you are, not your inaccurate label. The next time I hear “oh yeah tennis is you” I will just do the motion of ripping a label off, as if it were on the Nutella jar.