For Mental Health Awareness Month, I’m thinking of my son, who lives alongside OCD—the insidious kind that isn’t easily seen or understood.
As his stepmom, I’ve watched the steady work it takes to care for himself, day after day. Year after year. To meet what’s difficult without becoming it. To choose himself. To live beyond the labels that can take hold, both from within and from the world around him.
This poem speaks to that—what gets stitched into us, and what we slowly, patiently, try to unpick. (shared with his loving permission, Christine)
I Am the Label: a poem about labels and the challenge of removing them
I am the label
someone stitched
into the seams of your soul
many years ago
The tailor—only we know
All I’m sure of is
you’ve been trying
to tear me out
ever since
Neither one of us
ever asked for me
to be hemmed
into your hippocampus
But how time has taught us
my barbed-wire stitches
are almost impossible
to unpick
Almost
By Mark Bird retrieved from HERE
Invitation: “The labels I’m ready to loosen…”
Mark Bird is a children’s poet, author, and teacher who writes imaginative, emotional, and often accessible poems for younger audiences. He’s known online as DreambeastPoems and has had his work used in schools and featured in anthologies and education materials.
Below is a guided meditation that offers another way of being with what rises inside us. Not to fix or force change, but to notice, to soften, and to let things move without holding so tightly.
If you are enjoying The Community Table and would like to support our work consider making a donation. While the offerings on the Community Table will always be free - we appreciate any support you can provide to continue helping us set the table for creating community.
We will meet for the Community Table every Monday at 4:30 pm or 8:00 pm (EST) - Go to our calendar at this link for details: https://courageouscommons.com/events/
May Courageous Citizen
Doris “Granny D” Haddock
“Just as an unbalanced mind can accumulate mental stresses that can grow and take on a life of their own, so little decisions of our modern life can accumulate to the point where our society finds itself bombing other people for their oil, or supporting dictators who torture whole populations—all so that our unbalanced interests might be served.”
I am the label
someone stitched
into the seams of your soul
many years ago ~ Mark Bird.
_____________
This poem by Mark Bird offers insight that is helpful to me as I reflect upon labels people may impose on us that fosters an "othering" -- making someone "the other." This seems profoundly different from diagnostic terms that result in appropriate and helpful healthcare. And, for identities we may choose for ourselves to express who we are. I am mindful of the ethic of human rights and dignity that Eleanor Roosevelt gave to us and the world in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: self-determination. The nuances between these are helpful as we seek to understand ourselves and those in our lives and families.
We can ideologically say that we want no labels, but realistically and practically, as a financially poor single mom of a now adult son who has Asperger’s and Schizophrenia, I am thankful for the last 24 years of diagnostic labels that allowed him and continue to allow him to get the therapy, education and health care he needs at no or low cost. The willingness of a society to see the value of my son and appropriate the cost of 24 years of helping this toddler move through his journey to adulthood and beyond is human civilization at its best. And in a country of over 330 million people, this level of care is not possible without the education of and acceptance of difference and diversity that first comes with diagnostic labels, or as I call them, hooks you can hang your beautiful hat on for all to see.