What is an “identity label?” It’s a phrase that stands to represent a part of ourselves and our shared experiences with others. Such phrases are critical parts of communication, but they are also limited. The phrase isn’t the experience itself but, rather, is shorthand to express that experience.
For my mental well-being, I have found it important to cultivate a sense of who I am past the boundaries of language and, in terms of identity specifically, to see myself as more complex than any single word or phrase can capture. While it can be healing to embody an identity label to feel that sense of belonging, it can also be constricting.
When I always introduce myself with a list of terms pertaining to gender, race, ability, and so on, I start to feel pigeonholed, as if I am not giving others a chance to see me as an individual but as a list of preconceived notions. Letting go of identity labels, then, is a practice that helps me understand when it is important to name identity and when it is more beneficial for those aspects of who I am in society to go unsaid. By witnessing my attachment to my labels, I can deepen my relationship to them and to the people who share them.
This practice also supports me in challenging tokenization, whether it’s my tokenization or my potential to tokenize others. Do I want every story about my identity to center on being nonbinary, biracial, or disabled in multiple ways? No, because this can dilute people’s understanding of who I am. It can also turn me into an example of how all bipolar people are, for example, when that is not always best for me or for other bipolar individuals. Knowing about the problems with tokenization, I try to be careful about how I speak on my experiences of identity in case I am acting as a false expert, believing that my experience represents and captures the totality of everyone in that community’s experience.
It can be freeing to simply speak as me 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 community representative.
Step 1: Acknowledge limitations
Are there aspects of your lived experience that do not neatly fit within the bounds 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 do not relate to?
By witnessing the limitations of identity as a phrase, you can begin to glimpse your personal definition of it, compare that to the broader definition, and perhaps see how it works for you and for your community—and how it doesn’t. This shows up for me in being a South Asian yoga teacher. It can be incredibly important to name my racial identity in a space that is cultural, but when I always put that identity first in my yoga practice, it limits my experience.
Step 2: Cultivate the sense of being beyond labeling
My yoga practice is a great space to let go of the messaging—words, images, anything that proves your sense of self to others—and learn to simply 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 am practicing yoga, I do not always need to think of myself primarily as South Asian. There are moments when I can just move my body intuitively or meditate without needing to define who I am in society.
This ability to be who I am beyond the labeling applies to diagnostic labels too. When I am cleaning, do I need to be defined 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 am happy to share that I can!
Step 3: Return to your relationship with an identity label
Once you release the label, or expand your perspective of it, then you can come back with a renewed understanding of why it matters to you. Is there a sense of spaciousness, impermanence, and wonder?
Perhaps you can uncover new layers of meaning that did not occur to you before challenging the attachment to your identity label. Yes, the words for gender, race, sexuality, ability, mood, etc., are important, yet they also cannot define everything about who you are. Words for mental health, in particular, exist to pinpoint concerns and map an individualized healing plan—not to predict who you will become in the future.
Conclusion
Being in your experience, without attaching to a message, does not negate the experience. I find silence to be a space that honors complexities there are no words for. This can also open up connection to others who relate with the experience without necessarily relating to the identity label—and that includes people who came before us, in the times before these social constructs like race, gender, sexuality, religion, and behavioral diagnostics existed. Personally, I feel more peace and calm by connecting to these people and remembering that I exist as who I am because they existed as who they were.
