The rain can be like a bad dream where even a single step forward comes with great difficulty, and you are forced to stay in place.
It can also be a chance to sit back and reflect. I’ve had too many rainy days to count.
I hardly ever speak about my troubles until I am on the other side of them. It’s not that I am shy about them or ashamed. I just don’t want them to define me. But I don’t need to hide that they are there.
Think of a war orphan or a widow. When you use these identifiers to describe them, it comes with a sense of pity. But what if they found a reason worth living, and people who love them and support them?
I don’t see them as a war orphan or a widow because I don’t want to disempower them. If they have extra challenges. I can sympathize with that and maybe give them an extra hand if I am able.
But their soul is their soul and the story it is living is more complex than just a label, positive or negative.
Genius is an adjective to me, not a noun. There are no absolutes. A hero is merely someone who at one time and place inspires others through some heroic action. It does not define all their future and previous actions.
Being heroic was their choice at a moment in time and it may have even been an accident. It is often an indicator of what kind of life they live and personality traits they have, but not necessarily.
Perhaps they only stopped that robber because they were scared for their own life. Perhaps they only do good acts because they want to be seen as a good person and deep in their heart they have dark, sick fantasies. Or maybe they’re just a great person who was completely overlocked until some accident allow them to show their true values.
Perhaps that junkie on the corner is a hero who never had his chance to shine. Perhaps that orphan had parents that we so bad that having none at all was a blessing. Perhaps that experience will spur them to build the most beautiful of families in the future.
The doctor says you have 4 months to live but here you are 10 years later, completely cured. Science is not some complete and absolute doctrine, it always changes with new data and new discoveries and doctors only work under the assumptions they have based on prior data and assumptions. Maybe your illness was 100% curable but science hadn’t discovered the cure yet, and you stumbled upon it by accident without ever realizing it.
What would have happened if you had let your doctor box you in and had lost hope? Would you have survived? Maybe….but more likely….
Depression is something you go through, not something that defines you. ADHD is how you behave under the influence of certain chemical reactions in your brain that have been trained to secrete through your experiences.
Whatever chronic illness you have is only incurable under what we currently know. You may find the cure yourself, and it may be entirely personal based on a unique set of factors that is difficult to replicate.
(Just in case I’m opening myself up to some crazy allegations by the police bots of the future, let me add that I’m not a medical expert).
Your biological gender or sexuality or race doesn’t have to define you. If it does it’s probably because you’ve faced hardships and mistreatment based on those factors and your past. It likely wasn’t fair and it was probably pretty rough. I wish people had more empathy to see that. But you can overcome that trauma and be free from labels too.
It may be harder for you to overcome than others because you’ve been dealt those kinds of cards, but the harder it is for you, the brighter you will be able to shine once you overcome those struggles.
I understand there is a need to recognize transgressions against certain people. If someone is abused and mistreated because of the way they look or who they come to love (assuming they are fully consenting peers), people have every right to want to defend themselves and push for the right to do anything that doesn’t impose on others. They should work to build a culture where such discriminations are unheard of. And I believe all of us should help them.
But identity is a trap. The more you see yourself as a bunch of boxes to check off, the less freedom you have.
To put a label on someone is to sentence them.
It’s a form of violence, one that we could never punish fairly because people still deserve the right to speak freely, and to police how others think is a form of coercion regardless of what ideology it serves.
But I think we need to realize that our rigid ideas about the world lead to all kinds of debilitating limitations, and to suffering, for ourselves and for others.
No one deserves to be forced to answer for their race or their gender or their sexuality or their handicap or all rhetoric people who have experienced similar misfortunes.
Of course some people earn their stereotypes by fitting them perfectly, and they’ve brought on those stereotypes themselves. But to stereotype another who hasn’t earned it fully is a disservice to another. And to limit yourself based on what you think is expected of you “as an America” or “as a man” or “as a war veteran” or “as a person with autism”, is a disservice to yourself.
Respect others and respect yourself. Have compassion for yourself and be brave enough to follow your heart, even when it clashes with the ideas you have about who you are supposed to be.
As I get older I hope that I can continue to act in a way that feels natural and inspired, and not start to fit the idea of what someone in their 40’s and 50’s and 60’s SHOULD be.
