The Weight of Labels: When Others Define Who We Are

I remember the exact moment a nurse referred to me as 'the anxious one' — not to me, but to my best friend, just outside my hospital room door, as if I weren't a person on the other side of that wall but a file that needed flagging.

Labels get handed out like name tags at a conference — quickly, casually, and almost always without asking the person first.

That moment stuck with me not because it was catastrophic, but because it was so ordinary.