How would you label the person in this picture?
Introduction
It’s been a while since I’ve written in here and I’ve had an idea for a post for a long time, but haven’t had the ability to put it together in my head. Two nights ago as I was trying to fall asleep it finally seemed to coalesce into something, and I think what I was missing was a word: “Labels”. I’ve been thinking about what makes people the same, what makes people different, whether sameness or difference was the better of the two things, what the balance between being able to relate to people and being happy with my uniqueness is, and on and on.
I think what it really comes down to is context. Sometimes labels divide us, and sometimes they help us to connect with people who share our labels. My husband and I had a long conversation a couple months ago about neopronouns, which, if you don’t know, are gender-identifying pronouns that are not “he/him”, “she/her”, or “they/them”. The conversation brought up a lot for us to both think about - I know that, as much as I want to be respectful of someone’s pronouns, I often struggle with neopronouns because I’m never sure which pronoun to use in which situation. That said, if someone is asking me to recognize them for who they are with the language that I use, then that’s what I’m going to do.
Anyways, as I was in bed two nights ago, three categories of labels - and how each category changes based on context - came into my head. For the first time ever on this blog, I’m going to use section headers (exciting!) to talk about each category of labels, and talk about how labels in these categories can change drastically depending on context, but still be accurate no matter the context. Here goes:
Neurodivergence
I’ve talked a lot (A LOT) in my life about my mental health. I’ve probably talked about it to the extent that people have gotten sick of it. Mental health is one of the primary focuses of my life. The way my brain and emotions work have always been outside of the norm for society, and that peculiarity of functioning has made it so it’s almost impossible for me to ignore what my brain and heart are doing.
The first diagnosis I received related to my mental health was Major Depressive Disorder. Shortly thereafter I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. If I’m talking to someone I barely know and mental health comes up, or I’m talking to someone who seems to have very limited knowledge of anything mental health related, I’ll sometimes shorthand my mental health by saying, “I struggle with anxiety and depression.” The labels of “anxiety” and “depression” are technically true and applicable to me, but they don’t provide the full picture.
I was eventually diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. If I say to someone that I have PTSD, they probably have a very specific idea of what that means (based on media portrayals), but the common misconceptions about PTSD can be super limiting. A practitioner I worked with later in life specified that I qualify for the diagnoses of both event-based PTSD and C-PTSD. I remember having a conversation with a friend on a day when I didn’t have the emotional energy to get into my life story, and when I mentioned PTSD (as a general label for myself), they tried to one-up me by saying, “oh well I have C-PTSD, which is worse.” That exchange was exhausting, and I didn’t feel like getting into it, but I think that example goes to show that labels can divide us. In the Who’s Suffering More Olympics, labels can separate us from each other. Because of the common associations and misconceptions around PTSD, applying that label to myself is accurate and can provide some information about me, but is also not the full picture.
In late 2022/early 2023 I started having seizure-like episodes. They mystified the doctors who I was seeing, and those doctors eventually diagnosed me with Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures. The way these episodes were happening, along with my elusive-to-address emotional distress, caused my therapist at the time to send me to a psychiatrist for diagnosis. My then-therapist - who I now realize was not at all the right fit for me - thought I had a personality disorder, and the psychiatrist I saw ended up diagnosing me with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
This diagnosis was a nightmare for me. “Borderline Personality Disorder” was a label I never wanted to apply to myself. I have a degree in Psychology and, because of the textbooks I had read and the conversations I had with Psych professors and students, I thought BPD was the worst possible diagnosis a person could receive. After the diagnosis, I did a bunch of reading from the perspective of people with BPD, talked to a lot of people, and was told by my therapist at the time that she could no longer work with me. While the reading and conversations made me have a lot more compassion for people with BPD and helped me to realize how awful the stigma of that diagnosis really is, it also made me feel like that diagnosis didn’t fit me at all. I looked for a therapist who specialized in working with people with BPD, contacted one, and ended up with the therapist I have now.
My new therapist quickly discerned that I was right - BPD was a misdiagnosis. Miranda (my therapist) got to know me and helped me determine that what I actually have is ADHD. She helped me go through the diagnostic process for that, connected me to a psychiatrist who specializes in ADHD and got me on the right meds for it, and started helping me understand what my neurodivergence was. The label of ADHD helped me understand myself, and the reading I did about ADHD - ESPECIALLY about how the ADHD traits that typically manifest in women are markedly different from the stereotypical ADHD presentation, and that those traits can present in men - made me feel understood, empowered, and helped me give myself so much more compassion than I ever had before. Labels can have healing power too.
I continue to work with Miranda, and in January of this year she mentioned another label - Miranda asked me, “Have you ever thought you might have autism?” At the time, I immediately shut it down. I had worked with people with autism for years, and I thought I knew exactly what autism did and did not look like. I think my exact quote in response to Miranda at that time was, “I can’t deal with that right now, I can’t even hear that right now.” She dropped it, and continued to work with me on the things that were coming up in my life, but the seed had been planted.
Talk about autism started to sneak its way into my weekly therapy sessions more often - stuff like how common it is for Autistic people to also have ADHD; how the rigid rules I have around my life are really quite ubiquitous for Autistic people; my tendency to take things literally; how, like ADHD, the typical traits of autism that present more frequently in women and girls are very different from the traits that typically present in men, and Autistic women are SUPER FREQUENTLY misdiagnosed with BPD, and that those “female autism” presentations can happen with men; and on and on.
In April (just last month) I was willing to really talk about it. One of my very best friends who I talk to every Sunday is Autistic, and the amount of conversations we’ve had where I feel like I completely understand their brain (because it seems just like mine) is astounding. I decided I needed to know more, so I bought a book called “Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity” by Devon Price PhD.
I read this book voraciously. I had an extremely hard time putting it down. I feel like I want to reread it a million times over. Finally - FINALLY - there were words to describe my life, my experiences, and my feelings. I never thought there were words to describe me - I thought I was just peculiar, and that the way I feel and think are completely unique to me in a way that no one would ever be able to understand or comprehend. Reading this book gave me permission to be so much kinder to myself. I am not a freak, there is nothing wrong with me, and there are people who think, feel, and act like me in the world.
The book started to cause me to have flashes of moments in my life where autism was so obvious. I remember a time when we lived in Boston when a friend of ours told us that they were experiencing a lot of anger issues related to an absent parent. The next time we saw them, they were with the person they were dating, and I asked, “Hey, how is it going dealing with those anger issues you were struggling with?” Their facial expression would make you think I had just killed their puppy. They later took me outside and berated me for bringing up the anger issues in front of the person they were dating. I was dumbstruck, and I look back on it and still don’t fully understand what I did wrong, because it would have been absolutely a given for me to have talked about my anger issues with my partner.
Another obvious example of an autistic brain to me is thinking of my one family member who always thinks I’m being sarcastic and rude when I ask for clarification on things they’ve said. In those instances, I truly don’t understand and I need clarification, but my questions come across as abrasive, and I’m always surprised that I’ve offended that family member (even though it happens pretty much every time).
There’s a section in Dr. Price’s book about Autistic burnout. I won’t get into details about it (you can click on that link, or better yet, read the book!), but when I read that part, I immediately flashed to the months I had where I couldn’t function and was having seizure-like episodes multiple times a day. Was that Autistic burnout?
These examples are vague to protect people’s identities, but they are examples of times in my life that, looking back, are obvious to me that my brain just does not work the way everyone else’s does.
There are a lot of complications in applying the label of “autism” to myself. There’s a lot of controversy around the idea of self-diagnosis (or, as Dr. Price calls it in his book, self-determination, which is a term I greatly prefer). There are families of autistic people who think that anyone who self-determines that they have autism is minimizing the profound impact that autism has had on their lives. There are also people who think you just cannot determine for yourself that you have autism - that you only truly are autistic once you have received formal diagnosis. The issue with that is that, for adults, formal diagnosis is extremely hard to obtain, extremely expensive (and almost never covered by insurance), and - if you don’t present in the “Rain Man” or non-verbal or otherwise stereotypical variety of autism - extremely under-diagnosed. The “female autism” variety (or “Masked Autism”) is almost never recognized (especially in people who were assigned male at birth), and is almost always misdiagnosed as something else. And the only reason I would even pursue formal diagnosis is if I felt I needed accommodations for work, which I don’t feel like I do.
I am really struggling with the concept of calling myself Autistic because I just do not present in any of the ways I am so familiar with from my time working with Autistic people (AKA “male autism”). But this book, the conversations I’ve had with Miranda, and the conversations I’ve had with other friends who have the Masked Autism phenotype make it feel like the label is extremely applicable to me. I don’t want to appropriate a word that means so much to so many people, but the word and the label (and this freaking incredible book) have made me feel understood in an incredibly profound way. I probably won’t go around calling myself Autistic, but I think it’s indicative of something that this book made me feel truly seen and fully understood for the first time in my life.
This section of the post (under this “Neurodivergence” header) has gotten long, and I’m challenging myself to allow it to be as long as it is without apologies because it is - after all - my blog and doesn’t need to be adjusted for the audience who might be reading it. And I am definitely okay with people seeing how long the post is and deciding not to read, especially because I have two more sections to go. The label of Masked Autism - and the challenges that Dr. Price puts forth in his book for Masked Autistics to allow ourselves to unmask - feels like it’s giving me the permission to write whatever I want without apology, and that is just another example of what a label can do - allow us to live bravely, boldly, and unapologetically.
Gender
I want to preface this section by saying that I know gender is an extremely hot topic. I know people have really strong feelings about gender and gender identity. It’s another thing that I have thought a lot about throughout my life, and there are a variety of gender labels that have - at one point or another - applied to me. If you are someone who bristles at talk of gender identity or who feels offended when someone calls you cisgender, maybe skip this section. But also, maybe do a deep dive into why talk of gender identity makes you so uncomfortable.
Anyways …
I was assigned male at birth. If you don’t know what that means, it means that when I was born, the doctors and my parents saw my body and went, “it’s a boy!” For most people, the gender you are assigned at birth lines up with your gender identity, so if the doctors said, “it’s a girl!”, you probably think of yourself as a woman, and if the doctors said, “it’s a boy!”, you probably think of yourself as a man. If the gender you were assigned at birth matches your gender identity, that’s called being cisgender.
Most of the people who were influential to my development for the first several years of my life are people who I would call strong women. The women in my life have always been fierce, independent, and confident, and they are people who don’t take crap from anyone. They were not confined to the rules and norms of what it meant to be a woman. They were not going to adhere to the gender roles expected of them in the household or in the world at large. Additionally, I was obsessed with the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the portrayal of the different women in that show had a huge impact on my view of what it meant to be a woman. So I did not have what I would call a “traditional” view of what it meant to be a woman when I was growing up.
I would also say that I did not have a traditional view of what it meant to be a man. My dad was not a “man’s man”. There were certainly some traditional things about him, and he was certainly not effeminate, but he was in touch with his emotions, he could be very soft and sweet, he was affectionate with the people he cared about, and he wasn’t afraid to say, “I love you.” My dad was always known for the letters he would write to people. When people in my dad’s life were struggling, or even just when he was randomly thinking about them, he would write them a letter with genuine, heartfelt words about his care for them. With the exception of his occasional road rage, my dad didn’t exhibit any signs of what I would call toxic masculinity. He was not forceful, he was not presumptuous, he was not entitled, and he was not brash. My dad (as is the case for most people with their dads) was the primary example of what it meant to be a man in my life, and I’m grateful for his influence on my perception of maleness.
In school growing up, I never quite fit in with the boys. While I played soccer for a lot of my childhood, I truly never cared if my team won or lost, and it remains the case to this day that I do not have a competitive bone in my body. I had a fascination and encyclopedic knowledge of comic books and superheroes, which is a “typically male” trait, but I never really had any interest in proving how tough or strong I was. I had friends who were boys and girls, and I never felt any kind of gender dysphoria, but I knew I was different.
When I realized I was not straight, I thought the way I related to my gender was due to that. I went to an all-boys private Catholic high school, and I was surrounded by pubescent young men who were forging their own masculine identities while being influenced by the boys around them. I was lucky that my classmates displayed such a wide range of what it meant to be a boy, and when I started to come out to my friends, almost all of them were accepting and supportive. Again, I knew I was different from the boys in my school - and I even sensed that I was different from the few gay boys I knew - but I thought at that time that my differences were due to my gayness, and even though I was different, I didn’t feel rejected by the boys who surrounded me in school.
This is a sidebar, but I think it’s relevant. My best friend in high school was a (straight) guy named Dave. Dave had his own way of being a boy that was not indicative of any sort of toxic masculinity. He liked heavy rock music (and his musical interests have greatly influenced mine), he liked science-fiction/action movies, and he was an athlete (mostly crew), but none of his maleness fell into the variety I would call toxic. Dave was the first person I came out to as gay at the age of 14. He lived about 45 minutes away from my house, so when we were going to hang out, we usually slept over at each other’s house. For some reason on this night that I was supposed to stay over, I decided Dave needed to know about my gayness, probably because I wanted to know ASAP if I was going to lose my friend because of who I was. We were talking on AOL Instant Messenger, and I asked him to hang up the internet (REMEMBER THOSE DAYS?!?!) so that I could call him (via landline, of course). I said something like, “Hey, before I come over to your house, I want to tell you something in case you don’t want me there. I’m gay.” Dave’s response was, “Okay, still coming over?” I said, “yup”, and my parents drove me to Dave’s house. I got to Dave’s house and he said, “Let’s go upstairs, I have something to ask you.” I was incredibly nervous - afraid that we had gone all this way just for me to get friend-dumped - but I followed Dave to his room. He closed the door and said, “I have to ask you something and you have to tell me the truth.” Nervous, I said, “okay”. Dave looked at me, gestured up and down his body, and said, “Am I hot?” I said, “well, you’re not really my type.” Dave responded, “Okay, let’s watch Aliens.” And that was it, that was my first coming out experience, and Dave’s example of how secure in his gender and sexuality a 14 year old boy could be was another huge influence on my understanding of what it meant to be a man. Dave and I haven’t had anywhere near as much contact over the last several years, but he will always be like a brother to me because of how true his friendship was in high school and college.
Back to gender …
When I started college, I quickly made a lot of female friends. I had a new perspective on life after publicly coming out, and I wanted to understand the experience of “the opposite sex”. I took a course on Feminism (taught by Dr. Tanya Loughead, an incredible philosophy professor) that radically altered my perception of what gender was. I started gleefully calling myself a feminist at every opportunity, and read some incredible books on feminism. I found that I related more and more to women - the way they think, the way they feel, and the way they interact with the world - than I ever had with other men. I didn’t think much of it - I just thought it was a gay thing - but the kinship I felt with my female friends was powerful.
The next section of this blog post (SPOILER ALERT) is going to be about sexuality, and as I’m writing this section on gender, I’m finding that there’s a lot of overlap in what I want to say. In general, my being not-straight had a huge influence on my understanding of gender, and I’m sure the next section, while focused on sexuality, will also touch on some gender stuff.
As I learned more about transgender people, something sort of happened in my brain. I thought that the way I’ve always felt I related more to women - and the way my brain has always felt more like what I saw in the brains of the women I love - might mean that I was a transgender woman. I went into a bit of a panic about it, and ended up reaching out to a Facebook friend who runs an LGBTQIA+ group to see if he had any advice or guidance for me. He connected me to another member of the group who is a trans woman, and we talked, and - for maybe a month or two - I was living with the idea that I was trans. I am extremely grateful for that Facebook friend (who I’ve never met in real life) for being there for me, practically a stranger, in a moment when I was really struggling. That person - and the trans woman he connected me with - were (I think) two of the three people I ever told that I thought I might be a trans woman. Looking at it now, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, but I have held onto a lot of fear of admitting to anyone that I questioned my gender identity to the extent that I thought I was on the opposite side of the gender binary.
This inner questioning led me to joining another Facebook group, this one specifically on educating people about the transgender community. I learned (and continue to learn) A TON from this group, mostly because of the posts by one of the founders of the group, Evey Winters. I started to identify more and more with the notion of being non-binary. I started telling some of the people closest to me that I was non-binary, and even made a semi-public Instagram post about it at one point.
I recently had a conversation with a new friend who has had very limited exposure to the LGBTQIA+ community. We were talking about gender, and she commented that my outward appearance is very masculine, but that my personality is very feminine. I don’t really think of my appearance or my personality as either gender, but I can absolutely see what this friend means by those words, and I’m certainly not offended by them. It was really interesting to talk to someone who is just getting to know me about my gender expression, because recently I’ve just been accepting that my gender is what it is without trying to label it.
The Autistic friend I mentioned earlier is a non-binary person. I met them in 2006, before they came out as non-binary, but even then I knew they were not cisgender, even though I’m not even sure I knew what “cisgender” meant at the time. When we reconnected last year and they came out to me, it seemed completely natural for that friend to be non-binary. We now video-chat every Sunday over Signal, and there are no words to express how glad I am that this person is once again becoming one of my very best friends. The more we talk, the more I feel that this friend’s experiences with neurodivergence and gender so closely mirror mine.
I have two friends - the one I mentioned in the last paragraph and another who I love dearly - who still use “they/them” pronouns for me after I briefly experimented with the idea of using those pronouns. While I am not sure I feel the label “non-binary” really applies to me anymore, I’m not sure which gender label really does apply to me. I’m completely comfortable with “he/him” pronouns. My husband sometimes calls me his “handsome man” or things like that, and I don’t ever feel dysphoric or upset at those pet-names. I have an Autistic friend who calls himself “a person in a man-shaped body”, and when he and I have talked about gender, we feel very much the same about our relationship with our genders. That said, those two friends who use “they/them” pronouns for me are absolutely the people who I feel understand my gender the most. These are people who I have talked about my gender at length with, and when they use “they/them” for me, it makes me feel profoundly understood and affirmed and validated.
I’ve used a lot of labels for gender over time. “Boy”, “man”, “gay man” (which, while it relates to sexuality, feels like a very specific kind of gender description), “possibly transgender”, “non-binary”, and a few others. Right now I don’t know what label fits. I honestly feel a lot of guilt about asking people to consider my gender when they’re interacting with me. I don’t ever mean to make anyone uncomfortable, I’m certainly not offended if you think of me as a man, I don’t feel any gender dysphoria that needs to be accommodated in my interactions with people, and - while maybe it’s indicative of me not properly prioritizing my needs for validation and respect - I’m not willing to ask people to get uncomfortable in our conversations if they don’t comprehend the complexities of gender identity. And for some people, it is extremely important to their understanding of my place in their lives to think of me as a man, and I don’t have any negative feelings about that, even if it doesn’t completely match up with my own understanding of my gender.
The friend I talk to on Sundays (the one who uses “they/them” pronouns for me) recently said, “I don’t think of you as a guy or a girl or cisgender or transgender, I just think of you as a Daniel.” That feels like an apt descriptor of my relationship to my gender - it kind of is what it is at this point.
So while the specificity of accurate labels for my neurodivergence have made me feel empowered, bold, and authentic, I’m at a point where labels relating to gender all feel inadequate. Again, this section has been long, but it seemed to me - when I was in bed the other night writing this post in my head - that talking about these two categories of labels really reflects the range of what a label can do, both positive and negative.
Sexuality
Again, I feel the need to preface this section. I will not, at any point in this section, be talking about what I do (or do not do) in my sex life. Frankly, that’s nobody’s business. This section - like the previous two - will be talking about labels that relate to sexuality. I recognize that this blog is public, and that there are people who read this blog who probably feel an aversion to the idea of hearing about sex from me. To those people - you’re safe.
As a follow-up to that preface, it definitely says something to me that I feel like I had to write a trigger warning as soon as I mentioned sexuality. While I could get into a rant about our society’s relationship to sex and sexuality (damn Puritans), I’m not going to do that either.
I have used a variety of labels for my sexuality throughout my life, but in the past several years, I’ve pretty frequently alternated between three labels: “gay”, “queer”, and (to a lesser extent) “LGBTQIA+” (or some variation of that). These labels for sexual identity probably mean very different things for different people. Believe it or not, there are people who still use the word “gay” as a pejorative, as in “That’s so gay!” The word “queer” is loaded too - it was used as a slur against a lot of people, especially people from older generations, to indicate a lesser-than status due to their not-straightness. The word “queer” has since taken on a lot of different meanings for a lot of people, and I’ll be talking about what it means to me. And then, of course, “LGBTQIA+” (or some variation of that) is being used as a negative quite a bit in the right-wing media these days. So really, when describing a non-heterosexual sexual identity, there’s really no label that is completely safe in every context.
I’ll start by talking about the label I use least often of the three - LGBTQIA+. This is sometimes called “alphabet soup” and the people to whom it applies are sometimes (either affectionately or not so affectionately) referred to as “The Alphabet Mafia”. I use LGBTQIA+ in official capacities. When interviewing for my current job, I told all of the people who interviewed me that I am a member of the LGBTQIA+ community because I wanted that out in the open right from the start, and I didn’t want to ever have to be in the closet at work. I think of calling myself LGBTQIA+ as the most G-rated version of my sexual identity. In the case of my job, I wanted to be able to say, “My husband and I are going out with friends this weekend” and not have it shock anyone. In that kind of circumstance, I think the LGBTQIA+ label is best.
I think of calling myself gay as a shorthand for people who may not understand the complexities of sexual identity. When I say, “I’m gay”, it means that I am a person who was assigned male at birth who is primarily attracted to other people who are men (cisgender or transgender). It also works as a shorthand to say “I am a man who is married to a man.” While the last section talked about how calling myself “a man” isn’t totally 100% accurate, the shorthand of saying “I’m gay” works in most circumstances to communicate the basics of my relationship orientation.
What’s interesting about calling myself “gay” is that it is becoming less and less a term that I feel works for me. Last summer, my husband and I went to a campground for gay men a couple times. We had a lot of fun, and we made a lot of gay male friends, and we’re planning on going back this summer. One of those friends has quickly become someone I would consider one of my best friends, and for that reason alone I’m grateful that we went to the campground. However, I’ve found that my way of being myself doesn’t neatly fit into the way these gay men are themselves. That’s certainly not a judgment, and in no way do I think I am better than the gay men I’ve become friends with. But my experience with these gay men mirrors my experience in college with the other gay men I knew. I just never quite feel like I fit. That said, I’m significantly less worried about whether or not I fit than I used to be, and am still looking forward to being in a fun, welcoming space.
I was following a gay male influencer/author online for a while, and he wanted to start a virtual book club for his followers. The first book in his book club was “The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World” by Alan Downs PhD. I started the book and almost immediately felt like it didn’t apply to my life. There were a lot of generalizations about the gay male experience that the author asserted were universally true for gay men, and the vast majority of them were not my experience. So I stopped reading the book, and that experience of trying to read the book even further confirmed my feelings that calling myself a “gay man” is - while an efficient shorthand - just not quite right.
The label I feel most accurately describes my sexuality is “queer”. Because of the fact that this word was used as a slur for so long and in such a hurtful way, I am very careful about using this label. Once again, the label I use is context specific. “Queer” is often used as an umbrella term for anyone who is not strictly heterosexual. I like the vagueness of the word “queer”. While I am primarily attracted to men, there are also non-binary people who I’m attracted to. I’m also occasionally attracted to androgynous women. I think of sexual attraction as fluid, so while I think it’s safe to say that the majority of my sexual attraction is directed at men, the word “queer” allows for more fluidity than the word “gay”. It also seems to more accurately honor my own gender identity - “gay” usually means “attracted to one’s own gender”, and as I mentioned above, who even fits the description of “my own gender”?
I also like that the word originally meant strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint. I like the idea of my sexual identity being unconventional, and maybe even a little “strange or odd”. Calling myself queer - because of the word’s original definition - also feels like I can broadly apply it to my life. My brain is queer (neurodivergent), my gender is queer, and my sexuality is queer.
I find it to be a really good, strong, satisfying word. It helps me feel like I am not strictly identifying with the gay male identity, which - while it is a completely good and equally valid identity - isn’t quite my identity.
Conclusion
Okay, this was the longest blog post ever. I just copied and pasted it into a Google Doc and it is over 10 pages long. I - in no way, shape, or form - expect anyone to have gotten this far. I wanted to write this post, and it’s been developing in my brain for a while, but I didn’t expect it to get this verbose. I knew I was wordy, but geez. I’ve been down here writing for hours, and it’s a work holiday, so my husband is probably missing being able to spend the day together. I’m going to wrap this up.
Labels are complicated. As I said in the Neurodivergence portion of this post, labels can be empowering and informative and helpful. As I said in the Gender portion of this post, labels can also be limiting and inadequate. As I said throughout all of the sections, labels are also almost always context specific. There is so much to a person’s identity that the labels we use are never quite enough. They can help us relate to each other - the non-binary Autistic friend who I’ve mentioned a few times is someone whose labels help me understand them better but also have helped me understand myself better. They can also divide us, as I mentioned regarding what kind of PTSD two people have and which one wins the gold medal in the Who Is Suffering More Olympics.
I don’t really know what the point is. I think I just wanted to get this all down and reflect on it all. I think the process of writing this has helped me understand myself better than before. And I think the encouragement from Dr. Price’s book has emboldened me to “unmask” in a larger context about my identity.
If you’ve gotten this far (and I don’t imagine anyone has), I hope this Odyssey-length blog post helped you think about the role labels play in your life. And, whether or not anyone reads this, I am extremely glad I took the time to write it.