Peel Off the Labels to Give Yourself Space

April 22, 2009 · by Joanna Paterson · in

The labels you’re given, or that you learn to apply to yourself, can hold you back.

Limit your sense of what is possible.

Peeling off those labels, and replacing them with words that create space, opportunity, and possibility can be a powerful thing.

Glenda Watson Hyatt writes about this in a post on the way that words can shape our reality.

Glenda has cerebral palsy.  When she was younger she was labelled as functionally non-verbal.

Now, through a remarkable journey, she is delivering presentations and addressing audiences all over the world.  And she is ordering new business cards asserting her new role as blogger, author, speaker.

I do sometimes wonder if positive labels can hold you back too though – or perhaps it’s just the way we resist their implications.

“Writer” is one of those words that comes with all sorts of connotations.  It’s laden with values and beliefs about what makes a writer, the kind of things they do, say, and practice, and, in most cases, how they’re different from the rest of us.

I found myself having a version of this conversation the other day, with someone who was resisting calling herself “a writer”.

We talked about the possibility of constructing what she did another way, minus the label.  So it was around being creative with words, images, photos and stories, in order to make a powerful connection.

That seemed lighter, freer and easier than the weight of the writer-word. As the day wore on, I realised how much this applied to me too, and how much I was itching to peel off the label of ‘writer’.

I don’t, generally, call myself a writer, because I honestly don’t think of myself as such.  Just ‘someone who writes’.

At the behest of a teacher I’ve been trying to adjust that mindset recently, practicing saying “I’m a writer” and “A writer is someone who writes”… the latter version to try and get me past rampant procrastination that I’m coming up with to avoid the act of writing.

Because the thing is, the more I’ve been trying to apply the label of “writer”, the less I’ve been writing.

The less my words have been resonating.  And the less fun I’ve been having.

When I sit down to write things – not blogs, because I do that almost effortlessly now, besides I don’t really think of it as writing… which is perhaps another issue to be explored… when I sit down and write things I find my inner critic having a field day.

“I thought you said you were a writer,” he sneers.  “Surely a writer would know what they were doing.  I’d think a ‘writer’ would be able to come up with something better than that.”

And so I head off.  Put my pen down again, and go away and do other things.

So what if applied some of my own medicine and tried something like this.

What if I took off a label that was making me feel stuck, and replaced it with something like this:

I’m not a writer.  I’m someone who uses words to try and change the way people think about themselves. About their writing, their stories, their lives.  And that includes her own.

With that different permission slip, the sense of burden starts to feel away.

I already feel the urge to sit down, to type, to talk to you.  To say: this is how it is for me, is it like that for you too?

Taking away the label creates the room to experiment, to try things out, and to play.  It takes away some of the inner critic’s most effective fire-power. And it allows the words, once more, to flow.

~~~

I’m interested in your experience of this one… Do you find that applying the label of ‘writer’ adds to or diminishes your sense of freedom, possibility and creativity?