Three Labels That Tortured Me Most Insidiously
The smart one, the alpha male, and most likely to succeed.
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 of 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 a 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…
