Lesson #12

The date today is February 10th, 2019; I marked today with this date because it is different from any other day that will ever happen again. I think that is the part that we forget about labels, because we often tend to focus on only the negative ones— yet there are so many that can be positive. Our tendency to feel judged by people’s comments, doesn’t allow us to see the beauty that comes from these marks.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know what it feels like to be negatively judged. It is incredibly insulting for people to assume that I am in regular classes, or that I may not care about my grades. I once had a math teacher tell me that I should not be in honors math, before he had even seen me take a test. But as much as I wish that this judgement could be minimized, I don’t think I would choose to take away the labels that surround us. One of the comments Deborah Tannen makes in “There is No Unmarked Woman” is “there is no women’s hairstyle that can be called standard” (554). Take the word “standard”, how does being standard sound more desirable than being different? I believe that women are blessed with our inability to be like everyone else. Yet Tannen chooses to make standard sound like a wonderful thing. I label everybody around me, but those labels are not inherently negative. Take my best friend as an example, I would label her as incredibly smart, charismatic, and compassionate; this is what makes her who she is— yet because I am describing her, I am marking her. These are the marks that Tannen was forgetting. We are all characters, and our life is us writing our storybook; and in my story I am perfectly happy to be labeled, even if I don’t always appreciate the labels I receive. I personally don’t believe that being marked is a bad thing. My math teacher may not have been right to label me as incapable of taking an honors class, but he did make me want to work harder to prove him wrong. The people who assumed I don’t care about school may have underestimated me, but that didn’t suddenly make me deem myself to dim-witted. The beauty with labels is that they are not permanent nor are they limiting. I am marked differently by different people. I am marked as a daughter, a girlfriend, a best friend— which are markings I am blessed to carry. We can choose to look at these labels as scars or beauty marks. No two people carry the same markings, and for that I conclude by saying that I would rather carry marks for everything, rather than losing all of the meaning that they carry. So next time you wish you could rid yourself of marks, I urge you to think about who you would be without a single marking.

Lesson #12: Who would we be without the markings we have?