I Am Not A Whole Person: The Identity Crisis That Comes With Labels

Graphic by Zoe Gigis

Tell us about yourself. The four words that can cause an entire room’s eyes to roll, hearts to skip a beat, or brains to go into overdrive. Because at the end of the day, who are we? It’s the pressure of having to attach labels to yourself in front of a group, and that will be what they think of when they think of you. If you say you go by a nickname, that’s what they’ll call you. If you say that in your free time you like to read, you’ll be a bookworm to them. And if you say you don’t know, they’ll look at you quizzically, unsure of what to make of you. Then are the big labels: sexuality, gender, race, etc. Figuring out how all these identities fit together to form who you are can be exhausting. Many people like to say that Gen-Z has strayed away from the overwhelming use of labels, but to some, it can feel like labels still rule over us, especially when we don’t know what those labels are.

I am a mixed-race, queer young woman. Specifically, I am biracial (half-Black and half-white) and bisexual. I used to joke that I couldn’t commit to being just one thing. I couldn’t commit to just being one race, so I was born two different ones, and I couldn’t commit to liking just boys or just girls, so it had to be both, as well as everything in between. But under the joke of it, I really wondered if I am just a split person, bound to always be separated into pieces, and never a whole person who is committed to just one identity or label. Everyone always wants to know who a person is, so I chose labels for myself that gave the illusion of knowing who I was. 

You see, I am a person who thrives off of control. I want to know everything that will happen, and I want to know every answer to every question. Mostly, I just want to know who I am. The thing is, for so long, I have let the world decide who I am for me. I chose to identify as bisexual when I realized I was attracted to both men and women and refused to even think about another label years later when a friend told me I sounded pansexual since I had dated nonbinary people as well. I didn’t want to go through the crisis of picking another label or picking my identity, so I brushed it off. I had already picked out who I was, so why change that? Even with my race, I have always told people I am mixed-race, but I secretly wished I could just be one thing so that it would be easier to answer when people would look at me and ask, “What are you?” Even my gender identity has felt vaguer in my early twenties because suddenly I realized that she/they were pronouns I could go by. Just like that, there was another label I had trouble putting on myself.

In the pandemic, I have been stuck with myself. My half-and-half, split self. I no longer had so many people around to tell me who I was, or forcing me to pick who I was. The thing is, that after the initial crisis of not knowing how to be alone with myself, I actually felt free from the pressure of always having to need a label for the sake of other people, and the sake of myself. Through the Black Lives Matter movement, I came to appreciate my racial identity, both my white and Black sides, and I realized it was okay to not be just one race. It was actually something that made me beautiful and gave me a unique perspective on the world. As I thought about my sexual identity, I found a label that somehow felt labelless: queer. It gave me the room to not have it all figured out, yet still gave me some of that control over how I identified. Then came my gender identity, for which I still identify as female, as I have the privilege of feeling comfortable in the sex I was assigned at birth. The thing is, I don’t adhere to gender norms, and I don’t want to adhere to them, so I feel in the middle a lot of times. Maybe she/they pronouns would be better for me. At least I’m finally open to having those conversations with myself.

Everybody has labels, whether they like it or not. Either we are all constantly giving ourselves labels, or the world gives them to us. Progressive younger generations rebelled against labels so hard that we actually just circled around to using an abundance of labels again. It’s because of labels that I felt like only half a person for so long, but it was my fear of exploring and understanding my own labels that halted my personal growth. I am a whole person, who is constantly evolving and finding out more about myself every day. I may not be just one thing, but who actually is? Nobody is just one thing, and nobody stays the same for their entire life. Identifying all the different labels that one can use can be a terrifying experience, but the best thing you can do is just be open. Don’t overthink who you are, or who you want to be. Nobody knows exactly who they are, and that’s okay because we’re all on our own journeys to figuring it out.