I began my high school career with one of my less wise decisions: to volunteer during an allschool assembly for what I had been told was a spelling bee. I was told wrong. It was a danceoff. It lasted only two minutes, but believe me, it was a looooong two minutes, filled with pumping bass, intimidating dancing upperclassmen, and me being a sort of stiff deer in the headlights and kind of bouncing up and down like that could count for the dancing part. Still, it eventually came to an end, and I scrambled back up to my seat on the bleachers, and by the next day I had pretty much stopped blushing every time I thought of it, and conversations had moved on to other topics, and I thought, Okay, so this is high school, it's not too bad, I can do this thing. And I couldI did. I’ve learned so much here, about literature, about calculus, about physics, and more general things, like work ethic, study skills—I’ve learned a lot here. It’s been a good four years. But I could have made it more. We often hear about high school as a blank page, a time you can start over. But I came to this school with a label I’d brought from middle school, a sort of “brand name”, if you will. EMILY BRUELL . It’s kind of a quiet brand, the kind of brand who takes a ton of AP classes, and who wins spelling bees, not dance competitions. The selling point of the brand is that it’s smart, although users may experience side effects such as over quietness, spending too much time stressing over tests and grades, and behavior frequently classified as nerdlike. But the thing about labels is that even with serious side effects, they’re always there. They’re secure. It’s like you have this readymade identity that you can just step into, and you don’t have to worry about who you are. And so the more I experienced these side effects, the more I clung to this brand of SMART GIRL . I even have it, here, a little prop [for the actual speech I had a sign labelled SMART ]. I worked to fulfill it, studying, working diligently on every perfectionist detail of my homework. And I don’t regret trying so hard in school. It’s given me a good work ethic. It’s gotten me places, like Bates College, that I couldn’t have gotten without working so hard. But I also made school my identity. I made SMART GIRL my identity.
It took me leaving here for a semester to realize that there was another reason why I clung to the brand of SMART GIRL even as its side effects made me wish I could drop it, and that was because I was scared of the power of labels. I was scared of how they could make a girl no more than a dog , effortlessly emasculate a guy or reduce a person to a scrap of his ethnicity with the use of a simple racial slur. My label may have kept me from getting invites to the wild parties, but it also gave me a niche, a place of acknowledgement and acceptance. It was certainly a better label than GIRL WHO TRIED TO DANCE BUT ENDED UP DOING MORE OF A SCARECROW IMITATION IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE SCHOOL, which was the label I’d worried about after that assembly freshman year. No, SMART GIRL was better than that, a safe label, the kind of label that I could use to shield myself from worse labels. Knowing the power of these labels terrified me, especially because in my time away from Roaring Fork I realized something about myself, something more than what fit under SMART GIRL . I realized that I am gay. And I was terrified of the stigma that that label held. And the easiest thing to do when you are scared of something is to ignore it, to just keep on acting the way you did before you got scared. So I continued being brand SMART GIRL . I continued working to fill that identity, and to make sure that nothing contrary to it slipped out. But...now it’s out. In fact, we can make it more officialthere. Okay. [flip sign baround] The label of GAY GIRL is irrevocably revealed. And standing here, still in one piece, I’m realizing that while the label is accurate, it’s also not everything. I’m not just gay. I’m not just smart. No one is. No label is big enough to hold an entire person But we still keep trying. Which of us have never been labelled as anything, never been the CLASS CLOWN, the OVERACHIEVER, the DUMB JOCK, the DRUGGIE, the PREPPY GIRL, the SLACKER? Which of us has never felt the constricting side effects of these brands? It’s our nature to look around at people we don’t know and try to define them. Labelling and being labelled are commonplace here, almost habitual. But every time we define a person so narrowly, we miss seeing the parts that don’t fit under that definition. We are all more than the sum total of how we are seen and what is expected of us. We have this capability, this opportunity, to create our own identity and live it.
From here on out, we’re no longer in the zoology classroom, where every species has a label clearly attached. From here on out, we’ll have to learn it as we go, build our opinions of others and our own identities as best we can without the help or harm of being taught it. And to me, that’s terrifying, and it’s also really wonderful. This is it. Welcome to a time of living without readymade labels. Welcome to a time when you’ll make perfect judgements and poor ones, where you can discover pieces of yourself that fit with who you want to become and pieces that don’t. You can make up for this freedom, of course, by making more labels, labels of who is worth your time based on class, race, gender, IQ–you can make your own labels, if you want. It’ll be easy to do, and there will always be people who follow the labels you make. But you can also choose to give up these labels, to judge a person simply as a human. This is our opportunity for a life without labels. Take it.