Thara.

Woman. Mother. Brown. Asian. Immigrant. Wife.

Labels can bring people together, but they can also tie people down. Labels can help find someone a community, but they can also wall someone in. Labels can identify commonalities between people, but they can also burden people with the unfair expectations of others.

There's a danger in looking at one another, and seeing only labels. There's a danger in being labeled a certain way, and therefore feeling one has to behave in a certain way. But we are more than just the words we use to define ourselves and each other. We have individual hearts and minds and bodies that work in complex ways to form our own individual experiences, preferences, habits, dislikes, loves, and souls.

When I think about myself in the eyes of others, I often think of the labels that they must see. But I hope to not hold myself back because of those labels. I hope that one day, we can accept our labels, without stopping ourselves at the boundaries they create.