I’m not an optimist. I’m a realist. And my reality is that we live in a multifaceted, multicultural world. And maybe once we stop labeling ourselves, then maybe everyone else will.

~Octavia Spencer

 

Everywhere we turn, there’s a statement about who we are—based not on our being, but our doing. And often, those statements trace back to childhood trauma, as if our adult choices are merely echoes of early wounds.

We are constantly offered explanations, often unsolicited, that attempt to decode our lives through the lens of lack. But what if our lives are not puzzles to be solved, but adventures to be lived? What if healing isn’t about proving where the pain began, but about choosing where the joy can grow?

If you’re a single woman, independent and content living alone, the world may say it’s because you were isolated as a child. That your parents were unavailable. That you had to overachieve to survive. Maybe you were. Maybe you weren’t. But does that mean your solitude is a symptom of something else? Or could it be a sacred choice?

We use trauma as a kind of shorthand—a get-out-of-jail-free card to explain away who we’ve become. But nothing stays as it was. So why do we keep labeling our lives as if they’re frozen in time?

Abandonment as a child? You might avoid relationships altogether. Or cling to them long past their expiration. Parents who mishandled money? You might struggle financially. Or hoard wealth like armor.

Yes, our circumstances shape us. But they don’t own us. What if we stopped tracing every thread back to pain and started honoring the tapestry we’ve woven since? What if our choices weren’t diagnoses, but declarations?

There is power in naming, but there is also liberation in un-naming. In releasing the need to justify our joy, our solitude, our success, our softness. We are not case studies. We are constellations—each choice, each moment, a flicker of becoming. Or maybe we are just a box of chocolates, as Forest Gump’s mother always said: You never know what you are getting. But once you bite in and taste it, a range of possibilities can appear.

Questioning the narratives we inherit and the ones we unconsciously perpetuate is a great starting point for self-discovery. We may need to circle around the tension between origin and evolution: how our past may inform us, but doesn’t have to define us.

I am not implying not to do our soul’s work; letting go of the traumas, beliefs, habits, and doctrines that no longer serve us. Let go until there is nothing left. No triggers, no residual ick. I just want to stand up for those who do the work and have found peace in the lives they have created. For now, it is exactly right, yet it isn’t a life sentence of sameness. It is an ever-unfolding, growing, moving mosaic of who we were, who we are, and who we are becoming. Let’s discard labels and embrace the individuality of each of us.

Labeling makes the invisible visible, but it’s limiting. Categories are the enemy of connecting.

~Gloria Stienem