Letting Go of Identity Labels: A Healing Practice

MHA Admin

Mon, 07/15/2024 – 10:05

by Dom Chatterjee, Founder of Rest for Resistance and QTPoC Mental Health

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.

DID YOU KNOW?

The Capital City Emergency “Level II” Trauma & Wellness Center will house a “state of the art” Outreach Community Resource Center, that will provide case management, mental health community advocacy, and oversight from the M.I. Mother’s Keeper mental health advocates. 
 
The Capital City Emergency “Level II” Trauma & Wellness Center will offer patrons access to immediate coverage by general surgeons as well as coverage by the specialties of orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, anesthesiology, emergency medicine, radiology and critical care.
 
Our goal is to help people in the best way possible in an effort to preserve and to save more lives in the Nation’s Capital and beyond.

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trauma

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At Capital City Emergency Trauma & Wellness Center patrons with mental health emergencies that include life threatening situations in which an individual is imminently threatening harm to self or others, severely disoriented or out of touch with reality, has a severe inability to function or is otherwise distraught and out of control, will have access to quality and psychiatric emergency services and referrals.

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Whether your life threatening medical emergency involves excessive or uncontrollable bleeding, head injury. difficulty with breathing, severe pain, heart attack, vision impairments, stroke, physically collapsing, or seizure related, rest assured that our professionals will properly assess and evaluate the level of response that will be most needed to help provide stabilized care solutions and minimize complications as well as reduce early mortality.

Holistic Healthcare

We offer healthcare solutions that will support the whole person which includes their physical, psychological, emotional, social, & spiritual wellbeing. Research supports that because your mental state can affect your overall health we support and offer the inclusion of complimentary and alternative medicine(CAM) practitioners and naturopathic doctor recommendations and referrals as a part of our Outreach Community Resource Center’s care regimen and support.

Rehabilitative

Emergency care can typically result in traumatic injuries for which rehabilitation becomes an essential component of care in trying to achieve the best long-term outcomes for the patient. In addition to speeding up recovery times and helping to prevent further complications, rehabilitative care also helps to support a patient’s self-managed recovery once discharged from our facility. Our Outreach Community Resource Center works closely with our trauma center’s discharge department to assure that patrons requiring these services are linked with qualified professionals who will be accountable to the standard of care required to help the patron be successful in their recovery.

Social Services

Our “state of the art” Outreach Community Resource Center intends to promote “expansive” beneficial community enriching services, programs, case management, & linkage to “approved” partner resources and supports in all of the following intended areas and more:

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Community Outreach

The Healthy DC & Me Leadership Coalition is partnering with the M.I. Mother’s Keeper Mental Health advocacy organization to provide outreach services on the community level as an aid in reducing the existent health inequities that many District citizens are facing as a direct result of the presence of debilitating social determinants and the lack of culturally appropriate care choices and realities for community members residing in marginalized and lower-income communities.

It is the vision and intentions of the M.I. Mother’s Keeper Mental Health Advocates organization to help improve the quality of living for citizens living in our Nation’s Capital and beyond by overseeing the delicate linkage to services and by maintaining higher standards of care accountability for deserving citizens of the Nation’s Capital.

For more information or to enroll as one of our service providers, please email us at:
info@healthydcandme.org