telegantmess:
have likely never felt the flood of relief that there is a WORD FOR WHAT YOU ARE after spending years wondering if you were broken, what was wrong with you, feeling ridiculously isolated and having other people complain about things you can’t change about yourself. If there’s a word for it, that…
Labels are not bad. They become bad when other people apply false or degrading labels to you, but this does not ruin the entire category of “names for things that you are”. A label is just a concise way to describe something about yourself.
I don’t understand the idea that not having a name for a facet of your identity somehow makes it more special or authentic or whatever than if it did have a name. It just makes it more nebulous. Nebulousness is not a virtue. Being unable to describe something does not make it better. (While many wonderful things are nebulous and hard to describe, this is not an associative property. It does not make nebulousness valuable.)
On the other hand, labels that don’t fit you are not very useful at best and harmful (either to you, or to other people whom they do fit) at worst. You shouldn’t shoehorn yourself into a label. If you haven’t found a label for a part of your identity, there’s nothing wrong with that. You may want to keep looking, though. (For example, I myself have yet to find any established labels that satisfyingly describe my gender identity, which leads me to either apply the all-purpose umbrella term ‘genderqueer’ or use entire sentences to create a rambly sketch of it. This strikes me as quite an inefficient way to communicate, but it’s better than using the wrong label.) What makes me roll my eyes is when people say labels are worthless and/or toxic for everyone, just because they haven’t enjoyed their own experiences with labels.
