The Power Of Naming

A weight on your shoulders or a fire in your belly?

There is a lot of discussion about ‘labels’. People can be very afraid of them. Often this is rooted in discomfort at naming something or someone to diverge from the construct of normal. For example, when I describe myself as brown around white people, they can display visible and sometimes vocal discomfort and confusion. Fairly recently I actually had someone reply with ‘what do you mean?’, as if describing myself as brown was some kind of political stance or challenge. The same goes for Autistic, Queer, Trans. There is a real fear around the naming of ‘other’.

Then there is the idea that if we could achieve an equal, respectful state of community existence, labels wouldn’t be needed. Our needs-based labels would fall away due to our needs being met by design, and our identifier labels wouldn’t be needed because the hierarchy that created ‘normal’ and ‘other’ would no longer exist. There would be no need for these terms - we would just go about living without having to use labels to fight oppression.

To really dig into this, I think we need a reframing, to stop talking about labels, and to start talking about naming. Naming is powerful. It can create shame, obligation, pressure. It can also restore freedom, joy and agency. When you have had your real identity taken from you before you had the chance to really inhabit it, names that help you understand who you are are lifelines. In the last few years I had this experience with Autistic and Queer. Most recently, I have also made myself a home in Trans Masc. I have been using Nonbinary and Trans for sometime, and while they are technically correct descriptors, they didn’t feel like they captured something nuanced and true. Trans Masc is a revelation. It is euphoria, aliveness and fire in my belly.

Perhaps the path to this equal future where these names aren’t needed, is to have a collective awakening, and name all that really belongs to us, while casting off what does not. We may then truly realise that ‘normal’ doesn’t exist, that hierarchies are bullshit, and all have the fire in our belly we need to fight for a future where we don’t need to categorise ourselves.

I recently had a conversation where I talked about having no sense of self for much of my life - largely because who I really was was not being reflected or nourished. As a teen, I would float between different groups of people, mimic and adopt different things from them and make them part of my identity. I did this with romantic relationships too. This meant that when romantic partners left me they didn’t just take themselves, but also the parts of me that I had moulded around and from them. For years I just thought I felt heartbreak more intensely than my peers, because breakups would almost destroy me. Now I realise, it’s because so little was left behind.

This same not knowing of ourselves that can lead to our identity being wrapped up in romantic partners, is also the vacuum that leaves room for racist, misogynist, evangelical, nationalist identities to grow. When not encouraged to understand our true selves, we may fill the empty vessel with anything that will give us a sense of identity and belonging- and this leaves us vulnerable to identities built on fear, control and violence.

We live in a reality where names are given to us without our consent. Our name given at birth, girl or boy, racial descriptors, body descriptors. These names shape us and can help or hinder us as we develop and as we experience oppression or unearned advantage associated with them. We have been raised to believe it is normal and acceptable to decide on names for others and to put the weight of those names on them. We take their agency from them in this respect, and we expect and accept that ours will be taken from us in return. This collusion in collective oppression is part of the fabric of our colonial reality, and challenging it pokes at fundamental beliefs we have about ‘the way the world works’. If someone can choose their own names, their own pronouns, their own descriptors, their own labels, they might have a level of freedom that challenges the whole system. I think the real fear here is that for many people, challenging their own non-consensual labels is terrifying. So rather than do that, they might lean in to those labels, lean in and elaborate, embellish and embolden to the point where their identity is so completely grounded in rejecting anything nuanced and real about themselves that they have created a monster. Communities spring up around these identities and the fear they are built on. In the UK they manifest in groups like the National Front, English Defence League, the British National Party and UKIP. They provide a sense of belonging and purpose, but rather than being rooted in something true and nourishing, they feed hate and violence because they are borne out of hate and violence toward the self, a self that was never allowed to emerge or flourish.

Names are powerful, and they will exert their power over us whether we choose to engage with them or not. Agency is reclaimed when we choose which names anchor us to our truest selves. Names aren’t about objectivity. They aren’t even about specificity. They are vehicles for understanding, they can give us access to the divinity that exists within all of us. They can give us insight, they can open up new paths. What if we divest from names that do not serve us? Divesting from whiteness, for example, might allow us to see our own racism more clearly and recognise that it is a system we can fight, not a name that belongs to us that we must defend. Divesting from straightness, might allow us to see the way capitalism has created compulsory heterosexuality to ensure the nuclear family model continues to keep us isolated from community and prop up the extractive labour system. Divesting from the gender we were assigned at birth, might allow us to put down the weight that comes with ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman’ that we don’t want to carry any more. We may find that some of those names still make sense as part of our identity, whether because they feel good and real, or because there is a responsibility to recognise unearned advantage that comes with them (such as white and man). But in examining them, exploring their depth and truth, and really reckoning with what expectations of neuro-performance these names are putting on us, we can start to establish a sense of self that is more nuanced, more true to ourselves, and maybe find that fire in our belly that will burn this hellscape of a system to the ground, so a decolonised reality can emerge from its ashes.

—AJ

Today’s Neuro-Embodiment Prompts:

Suggestions and questions to help you engage with mindbody decolonisation:

• What names form part of your identity when you are alone? What names only exist when with others? How can you explore what really belongs to you, and what might be part of neuro-performance?

• What names are important to recognise because of the unearned advantage they carry, while challenging whether they actually serve you? How can you divest from the systems behind these names, and explore who you are underneath?