i am not the word

I am a logophile; I love words. I used to collect dictionaries, mostly old ones, just cause I love words so much. I am a HS English teacher. I use dictionary.com’s word of the day every day in my classroom. I love learning about new (or old but new to me) obscure words. I like tracing back to old meanings of words we use today. Get the picture?

Well I may love words, but I hate labels. But wait aren’t labels just words? Oh semantics. Labels are words, but they end up being so much more. They become identities. And within that, people seem to think they become fixed identities. Once you are labeled as something, or more over when you level yourself as something, you are now that and can be nothing else.

I recently read a quote that I loved that said:

We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I’m going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

– Stephen Fry

It’s so true. If we change the wording, the semantics of it all, and think of ourselves and identities as verbs not nouns it can change the way we get stuck with labels. I love the idea of this because everything is now an action and you are talking about the here and now. There is no past or future. Only writing now. I write. I teach. I walk. I love.

The reason I hate the fixation on labels is that the rest of the world often feels the need to call you out if you do something outside that labels definition.

For example, I have in recent years considered myself ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘sustainable’, and have discussed at length on social media and my blog of ways in which I have changed certain things and behaviours to be that way. But I am not perfect. And I have even been called out by others many times for not being perfect. Every time I have a plastic straw or container (rare but when ordering food it has happened) there will no doubt be a student to point out my unsustainable ways. All because I labelled myself this way, and they now feel the need to make sure I don’t deviate from that label in any way.

Deviation from your identity often gets you labelled as something new, a ‘phony’. We often jump right into assuming that someone is faking being whatever they labelled themselves as, if they don’t fit perfectly into what that label means to them. It’s interesting how that happens. I’ve seen it a lot, especially when it comes to people who label themselves as sustainable or eco-friendly.

Another example being that ever since I was young, I was adamant I would never be labelled as a ‘wife’ to someone. I never wanted to get married. It seemed archaic and traditional, and totally not ‘me’. Whatever that even means now. But I have always enjoyed going to other people’s weddings and have never had any problem with the idea of spending the rest of my life with someone, but the label of ‘wife’ or ‘husband’, the idea of sounding as if I was someones property really turned me off.

But recently I read a book called Bitch Doctrine where the author discusses marriage in such a different way than I had ever thought about. She explains how now that marriage is not a necessity, or something needed in society, when one does actually get married, it makes it all the more special. In another article she said:

With all these options available, what about those who still choose marriage or partnership? They can couple up in the knowledge that their choices are made freely. When partnership ceases to be mandatory, it only becomes more special.

I used to be so hell bent on marriage being too ‘traditional’ that I never thought I could see it as anything but a thing people do ‘because you are supposed to’. But the way she discussed it in the book, and then again in the article mentioned above, really has me questioning if maybe marriage isn’t the archaic tradition I always labelled it to be.

But then comes the issue where I have spent my whole life identifying myself as ‘the girl who doesn’t want to get married’ that if I were to change my mind and get married, there would be a lot of ‘I told you so’ or people thinking that I was lying to everyone (or myself) and wanted to get married this whole time. There will be the people who told me in the past that I would ‘change my mind’ and I was adamant I wouldn’t, who will have to point out that happened and how I was wrong. Lucky for me, I don’t give a shit what other people think of me or the decisions I make in my life. So if I decided to get married, they can get bent.

So anyways, the real issue is that whatever it is that we label ourselves, we have a vision in our heads of what that label means, but outside of yourself, everyone else has a slightly different definition of that same word.

We tend to forget that we create words, as well as the meaning behind them. Words change. Nice used to mean stupid. And even now nice can mean different things depending on the situation. If a guy is asked what he thinks of a girl who likes him and says ‘she’s nice’, the girl can take that as he doesn’t like her like she likes him. But if your friend buys you chocolate to cheer you up, you might call her nice for doing that.

So words don’t only change over time. They change according to situations. They change according to who says them. They can even get lost in translation when translated to different languages, the literal definition can meaning something different.

Take beauty as another example, many people’s ideas of what is beautiful are quite different, especially across cultures. So your vision of what the label of beautiful is, would not be the same as mine. Someone might find a full figured woman beautiful, while others idea of beauty is someone thin. Beauty is something that changes across cultures, time, and just person to person.

When the only thing constant in life is change, we have to understand that definitions change too. Words change. Therefore labels will change. If we start to think of ourselves in terms of verbs instead of nouns, I believe it will give us the ability to transcend this idea that our identities are fixed. We are doing, we are not something.