labelled

maybe i'm not who you think i should be

I grew up never truly understanding how I was labelled when people looked at me.

As a Black kid, alone, caught in a sea of whiteness, I was never told that it was the Black that people saw first when they approached me. And from that, was determined what they thought I would and could be.

ID: Sandra is a very young Black girl in a pink bathing suit who sits by the pool holding a beach ball. She is smiling but even from that age, she knew she had to play a very specific role for the people around her. END ID

I cannot adequately describe what it takes to live like it’s ok being visibly different from everyone around you. Learning you can never question things - that it just is. All I know is that one day you wake up and it feels like second nature. Second nature to ignore all the messages in your body - the anxiety and fears, the loneliness, the desperate need to belong but somehow knowing you never quite will…  and one day wake up helpless to the fact that you’ve somehow morphed into the labels you’re given. 

It’s almost like you’ve forgotten you’re not like everyone else. Or that your differences don’t really exist anymore until once again, you’re treated like being different from everyone else is the only thing that matters. But still, you keep stuffing yourself down, trapped within their label’s definition for you, because they couldn’t possibly have said that?

Tried that?

Assumed that?

Asked that?

No.

It must be you overthinking it again. Just stay quiet. Don’t make a scene or you’ll never be OK here again. Just try harder to make them forget the labels they’ve placed on you. Those labels they’ve created and defined that you’re expected to fit, become or assume you already are - whether you asked for it or not. Whether you believe it or not.

Because you couldn’t possibly have a vision for how you see yourself anyway, right??

I tried so hard to define who I longed to be, never knowing that the skin they saw was all they felt they needed to know to define me.

Being Black became a label before I ever knew it could be an identity. Or that it could be defined by me.

I’m searching for the humanness that lies beneath the labels we’ve been forced to wear, and what it means to push against them, redefine them or simply let them go. What have you learned about the labels that defined you and how are you learning to question them?