Old Shoes

For Emily and Sarah.


It's funny how we let ourselves be defined by labels.

I think it starts in elementary school, when you actually start becoming your own person making your own desicions. You hear yourself labeled one time and you either embrace it completely or reject it. The label "tomboy" could mean that you spend your formulative years wearing anything but dresses, or only wearing dresses.

 It's like the first pair of shoes you got to choose yourself; it's not exactly what you wanted, but it is what your mother thought you needed for school. So you make it work.

But the labeling doesn't end in elementary school. In middle school you become a nerd, or an athlete, or a pagent princess. For me, I was the "outsider."

And so in high school, the label "introvert" just becomes an scientific-sounding progression of that previous label. How easy it is to go from "tomboy" to "outsider" to "introvert." The labels become less defining, but it doesn't stop us from trying to live them up or down.

You think that college is a whole new beginning, but you've lived in the labels so long that college ends up just being an extension of high school. Unless you take drastic action that summer before freshman year (changing you name, your hair, your clothes, losing that baby fat, etc.), you continue to be an "introvert". It's simply easier that way.

You even leave the country, and you hold on to those labels. They mean something at this point. They're an explaination for that hard question: "Why are you the way you are?"

"It's hard for me to meet people 'cause I'm an introvert."
"It's hard for me to learn new things 'cause I'm not much of a studier."
"It's hard for me to try new things 'cause I'm more of a reader than an doer."

And then you realize, in the middle of a conversation with a friend, that she thinks your an extrovert. Of course, you protest vehemently, because if you aren't an "introvert"... then what are you?

But nevertheless you begin to wonder.

Out of curiousity, you take a personality test.

And you find out, she might be right.

"It's hard for me to meet people," you've been saying to your new friends.
"It's hard for me to learn new things," you've been saying in your beginner's spanish.
"It's hard for me to try new things," you've been saying while traveling the world.

Maybe it was easier to explain why you couldn't do something than to just do it.

You'd been so worried about explaining your limitations to yourself that you haven't realized you've outgrown the labels (and the limitations). Maybe you find that the labels never really truly fit right. Like that pair of shoes that's a smidgen too small that you wear because it's easier to keep wearing them then go shopping for new ones.

 Maybe, like shoes, you can never own just one label. Or maybe, like shoes, you're constantly wearing them out.