What is an “identity label”? It is a phrase that represents a part of ourselves and our shared experiences with others. These phrases are essential parts of communication, but they are also limited. The phrase is not the experience itself, but rather a shorthand way of expressing that experience.
For my mental well-being, I’ve found it important to cultivate a sense of who I am beyond the boundaries of language, and in terms of identity specifically, to see myself as more complex than any word or phrase can describe. While it can be healing to embody an identity label to feel that sense of belonging, it can also be restrictive.
When I always present myself with a list of terms related to gender, race, ability, etc., I start to feel pigeonholed, like I’m not giving others the opportunity to see me as an individual, but rather as a list of preconceived notions. Letting go of identity labels, then, is a practice that helps me understand when it’s important to name identity and when it’s more beneficial for those aspects of who I am in society to go unsaid. By observing my attachment to my labels, I can deepen my relationship with them and the people who share them.
This practice also helps me challenge tokenization, whether it’s my own tokenization or my potential to tokenize others. Do I want every story about my identity to focus on being nonbinary, biracial, or disabled in multiple ways? No, because this can dilute people’s understanding of who I am. It can also make me an example of what all bipolar people are like, for example, when that’s not always the best thing for me or other bipolar people. Knowing the problems with tokenization, I try to be careful about how I talk about my identity experiences in case I’m acting like a false expert, believing my experience represents and captures the entirety of everyone’s experience in that community.
It can be liberating to simply speak as myself and not as a member of one of my communities, and this practice of letting go of identity labels — temporarily and with clear intentions — gives me insight into when to embody my individuality and when to serve as a representative of the community.
Step 1: Recognize limitations
Are there aspects of your lived experience that don’t fit neatly within the boundaries of what an identity label communicates? What other words, images, or sounds help you convey this experience? What have other people with this identity shared that you don’t identify with?
By looking at the limitations of identity as expression, you can begin to glimpse your personal definition of it, compare it to the broader definition, and perhaps see how it works for you and your community — and how it doesn’t. This plays out for me as a South Asian yoga teacher. It can be incredibly important to name my racial identity in a cultural space, but when I always put that identity first in my yoga practice, it limits my experience.
Step 2: Cultivate a sense of being beyond labels
My yoga practice is a great space to let go of messages (words, images, anything that demonstrates your sense of identity to others) and learn to just be.
Do you have cultural practices where you can witness the difference between moving in it as a… [insert identity label here] And letting go of that label? For example, when I practice yoga, I don’t always need to think of myself as a South Asian person. There are times when I can move my body intuitively or meditate without needing to define who I am in society.
This ability to be who I am beyond labels applies to diagnostic labels as well. When I’m cleaning, do I have to define myself as a person with OCD who is cleaning? Can I just put on some music and get the job done without considering my anxiety level or noticing how many times I wash my hands and wondering if it’s clinically considered too much? Yes, I’m happy to share that I can!
Step 3: Return to your relationship with an identity label
Once you let go of the label or broaden your perspective on it, you can come back with a renewed understanding of why it is important to you. Is there a sense of spaciousness, impermanence, and wonder?
You may be able to uncover new layers of meaning that hadn’t occurred to you before by challenging your attachment to your identity label. Yes, words for gender, race, sexuality, ability, mood, etc., are important, but they also can’t define everything about who you are. Words for mental health, in particular, exist to identify concerns and map out an individualized healing plan, not to predict who you will become in the future.
Conclusion
Being in your experience, without being attached to a message, does not negate the experience. I believe silence is a space that honors the complexities for which there are no words. This can also open up connection with others who identify with the experience without necessarily identifying with the identity label, and that includes people who came before us, in times when these social constructs like race, gender, sexuality, religion, and behavioral diagnoses did not exist. Personally, I feel more peace and calm connecting with these people and remembering that I exist as who I am because they existed as who they were.
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