When Does A Label Become A Lie?

We as humans love to label. There’s a tree over there, it’s a sycamore. I love pizza, I hate the rain. I am not the type of person who…. Fill in the blank. And with each label we bestow upon ourselves or are gifted by another, this being becomes that little more restricted. Constricted within a house of labels and they all seem so real.

I have never ridden a bike. I am 44 years old and I don’t know how to ride a bike. I never learnt as a child, never had a bike growing up. So it is a label I have carried around with me when anyone asked or when I would see someone cycle past me, I would think, oh I don’t ride bikes, I don’t know how to. Some people would react in shock if I told them, as though it was impossible that a grown woman had never learnt how to ride a two wheeled device. I would sometimes retort that I did know how to drive a car and in my head thought surely that is more difficult.

So it begs the question, when does a label become a lie. It’s as soon as we release it. When it is no longer true, even if you are so accustomed to seeing yourself in this one way that you refuse to give it up. It then becomes a lie.

I made a label into a lie, this week. I saw someone cycle past me on a walk this week in the park and she was riding what I would deem a somewhat smaller bike. And the idea struck me, that I too could learn to ride a bike if my feet were able to touch the ground in the event of me needing to break a fall. That was on a Sunday, by Thursday I was the owner of a second hand bike and was learning how to ride in the local park. By Friday, I had made my first small circle round the park without needing to stop. A label that had fitted me for 44 years was now defunct. Yet I still see myself as someone who doesn’t associate herself with anything to do with cycling. I am lying. I am now able to ride, albeit it in a pretty unstable manner.

And that is how we label restrict, lie and then release, even if we refuse to let go of the label, it lets go of us and there we go freer, lighter and even in the tiniest way a little less labelled.