When something’s going wrong with your health or your life or your relationships, or if you’ve suffered some horrible experience or found yourself holding just a really bad hand of cards, it’s understandable that you might begin to feel like you are uniquely incapable, bad, dumb, flawed, or unworthy.
This is almost certainly not true (each of us are all of those things and none of those things, at times), but it’s a relatable feeling.
It can be a relief, then, to find a group of people who are going through similar things, and to maybe even adopt a label that points at this perceived condition or status.
These labels can be useful in that they help us feel less alone and can make it easier to connect with others who have had similar life experiences. These labels can make us feel normal. We can suddenly say, “It’s not just me! This is a thing, look at all these people who understand!” And that feels good and can be helpful and healthful.
If we’re not careful, however, these labels can subsume everything else that we are. Our unique traits and circumstances, our other interesting flaws, our superpowers. It can be so energizing, such a relief to be part of this group, that we neglect our full roundness, our three-dimensional density, sacrificing them at the altar of communal cohesion and conformity.
There’s something to be said for reclaiming labels that might otherwise brand us as flawed or weird or less-than, and it’s amazing to be part of something bigger than ourselves: to find people who get it, and who we can be our full selves around.
It’s also important to maintain a sense of who we are beyond these groups, though, lest we disregard (or discard) the totality of our unique, valid selves in the pursuit of recognition and understanding for just one sliver of who we are.
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