Who are we beyond our labels?
If simply knowing why our patterns exist was enough to change them, we’d all already be somewhere different. We have the words now. We know the labels. And yet so many of us are still very anxious, still overextending, still erasing parts of ourselves just to get by.
The internet is full of explanations; ADHD, anxiety disorder, BPD, and so many others. Language can be validating, yes. Yet over time, those boxes can make us believe we’re fixed, defective, or unchangeable, when really our lives are still moving, still alive, still open.
If we approach the labels as an end in themselves rather than as a window into understanding ourselves better, they can become what we live around instead of what we live through, keeping us stuck in the same patterns.
We’ve also been told that the brain is neuroplastic, that it can be rewired. But while that’s true, what we aren’t told enough is that the brain clings to what it knows. Familiar patterns, even familiar chaos, feel safer than the unknown.
Change asks the nervous system to step into what feels unsafe at first. This is where therapy and truly safe relationships matter. They give us room to slowly meet our defences, to see what they’re trying to protect, and to touch the self underneath. That meeting is not easy work yet often necessary for change.
Beyond the self-sabotaging patterns we built to survive, there is room to meet ourselves with curiosity instead of shame. There is scope for new ways of being, for remembering who we are when we’re not just surviving, and we simply deserve to meet ourselves there.
We are worth the work of discovering who we are beyond what we had to do to stay alive.
Women: ‘existence’ as revolt in itself
When I was leaving my first corporate job four years ago, my then boss threw a pen across his glass cabin in shaking rage when I asked to be compensated for my paid leave. As the pen landed in a loud drama (which was the point), I did not flinch, I just stood there, presented my case in a matter-of-factly manner and left the room. Later, he called me back to the cabin and said that he was sorry for getting out of control. I did not give him the satisfaction of appeasement by accepting the necessary facade of an apology.
Years later, when I look back upon all the experiences that have shaped my understandings and evolvement, I know now that I would have held that person accountable before leaving had it happened today. I would have also let him know in no unclear terms that he can, for his own sake, stop treating female colleagues in an expendable manner. Also while I’m at it, I might try poking his ego and belief that they have the space to rage uncensored whenever wherever in whichever manner they want.
But, you can only evolve in the pace you do and not a moment sooner. Even though I did as little as not letting that person get away with the act and left only after getting paid, I’m thinking of all the women who auto activate freeze mode at such overpowering situations constantly because their developmental trigger is activated and are reminded of atleast one angry male figure in their lives. An angry grown person who throws tantrums like a toddler whose prefrontal cortex is still in developing stages.
I’m proud of having been able to do just that much that day and I’m proud of maybe being able to do more than just that today. The point is, whichever uncomfortable point we are at in this muddy path at ensuring our presence in spaces we want, we need to remind ourselves that just our being there, more often that not, is a revolt in itself.
Emotional regulation in a genocide
A friend recently reached out with what many of us may be experiencing right now – a heightened sense of anger, grief, helplessness, guilt, numbness.
In an environment that constantly tells us that nervous system regulation is the goal, this might feel like an anomaly, thus making it difficult to validate. But, what would it mean to be in a natural state of emotional composure during active ğenöcïdë – if not conformity and/or complicity?
In case any of us could use this to be reiterated: being dysregulated in the face of oppression IS the appropriate immediate response.
That is not to say that we cannot strive towards some level of regulation, especially as a means to an end. It means actively doing the work of ensuring that we do not burn out without retreating to our comfort zones. It is about using the privilege of being mere witnesses to the genocide to more effectively carry out the work that falls to us. They do not have access to what it means to creatively maladapt, so we take on that labour from the position we are afforded, as they endure the heat directly.
This will look very different from what we know of working through difficult feelings. The dominant norms in psychology arguably pathologises emotional regulation, urging calm before confrontation. But, a decolonial lens invites us to locate that anger within the systems that produced it. To that end, Audre Lorde excellently calls anger ‘a well-stocked arsenal’. It requires us to sit with our grief and anger, refusing to trivialise it, as we channel it into fuel for our activism.
I believe we learn this through continuous trial and error. It is an art if not an impossibility. But also, what faith and resilience makes possible is maybe not explainable without romanticising survival.
Liberation as an embodiment
Omar Suleiman recently said that the answer to the recurring question, “what can we do?” is found in obsessing over the question. That is, the context we are in, the capacities we carry, the positions we occupy, all of these are complex, personal, and unique. But within each of those realities, there is always something that can be done, always a movement to be made.
The work doesn’t lie in replicating someone else’s form of resistance, but in discovering what is most potent and needed in our own lives, and then getting to work.
Social media, and the constant flood of brutal imagery, can make it feel like this is all there is. That we’re trapped in a loop of witnessing and reacting. But if we’re serious about collective liberation, we need to ground ourselves in more than just visibility.
This means not only facing the enormity of what is currently happening, but also understanding what sustained impactful action looks like where we live, in our communities, in our relationships, in our habits, in the way we move through the world. If apathy is the barrier, then moving ourselves and our people through that apathy becomes the work.
Liberation isn’t a moment. It is sustained, embodied practice. And it will likely look nothing like the lifestyle we’ve been taught to protect. It will require imagination. Discomfort. Letting go. Showing up. Again and again. The question isn’t if we can act, it’s how we will. Yet we carry more power than we’re led to believe.