A few months ago, my daughter asked me what one piece of advice I would give her as something of a standard to live by. It is a good question for a daughter or son to ask a parent. I’m not sure how often it happens, so I was grateful for the ask.

My first reaction was to reach for the profound. To search through the stuff that has made up my life history and find a nugget that was hidden way, that I didn’t remember was there. Pry it out from the wear and tear of an 80-year-old life, clean the detritus from the diamond I hoped to find buried in the muck of an ordinary existence.

And then, I realized I knew exactly what it was.

It had been my North Star for years. It was a phrase that a colleague had introduced to me years ago and that had at first confounded me with it simplicity and what possible depth it could hold.

Ironically, it had been his North Star for years. I took to it as though I was the one who gave it original air. It became something I included in all my communications seminars and still do..

It is my closer.

If you take nothing else away with you, take this.

But first, before the big reveal, I want to touch on something that may not seem related but I have come to believe most certainly is.

Recently as I was reading through the Substack offerings of Gael MacLean, I encountered one entitled I Am Not Your Label. As with everything Gael writes about and as I have observed in one of my previous letters, she does so brilliantly. In this particular piece, she discusses how we sapiens must, absolutely must, assign labels to one another.

“Here’s what I’ve come to: we label others to control our own terror.

“The uncategorized person is dangerous. Not because they might harm us—though we often believe this—but because they represent possibility. Ambiguity. The uncomfortable truth that identity is not fixed, that a human being is not a thing but a process, that the person across from us contains multitudes we will never fully know.

“To label is to contain. To say: you are this, which means you are not that. To draw a border around another person’s being and call it finished.

“The alternative—genuine encounter with another consciousness—requires something most of us are too exhausted or too frightened to give. It requires sitting in not-knowing. It requires letting the other person remain a question rather than an answer.”

Isn’t that a fascinating concept. As I let it play out in my mind and in remembered scenarios, I could see exactly how it works, and how it must be true.

Gael does her own labeling exercise of herself as a documentary filmmaker. Now, we’re getting somewhere. She’s less mysterious. And we’ve got her safely in a box.

For me, the label I give is that I’m a writer. Have been throughout my professional career. That helps.

But, I haven’t yet admitted that I write pornography.

And I won’t.

Because it isn’t true.

But you can see how quickly that narrows the field as to what type of writer I might be. And what type of person, therefore, I most certainly must be.

However, if I say that most of my writing was speeches, which is true, I become better defined and much safer to be around.

If I say I was a speech writer for a large sports organization, I also become much more interesting to at least half the population.

And all of this was accomplished with the use of, and frankly the demand for, some type of label that will keep a stranger’s fear at bay.

Gael doesn’t like this effect. She sees it as a type of imprisonment that the demand to know from others and our willingness to accept puts us into. We are now the prisoner of however others perceive that label.

I get that. And at first, it seems novel but about right.

But, as I read her piece, it occurred to me that I know about a get-out-of-jail-free card available to us if we choose to use it. It’s an anecdote for the fear-induced exercise we do every time we meet someone new and have to show them our label.

It is that piece of advice I offered to my daughter…and that now I give to you.

“Remember who you are and who you represent.”

There it is.

Shakespeare would have said “To thine own self be true.”

People will label you. Apparently, they must. It gives them peace of mind. And from the label, they will draw conclusions about you that may be true, but not likely wholly true. You are almost certainly more than whatever label others give you or you give yourself. Or, you may be less than the label suggests.

That first labeling exercise should never be more than a starting point. It’s no better than a sign along the roadway that says Community Ahead. We don’t know much. It could say Small Community Ahead, and our minds will immediately conjure up whatever visage we have that goes with the label. If we’re in New England, Small Community probably appears in our minds as something very different than if we are traveling through the poorest parts of the American south.

Isn’t it the same with folks we don’t know? Those who meet us for the first time will keep attaching labels until they think they have us in a box…a prison. That’s their problem.

But if you take the time to remember who you are and who you represent and if you remain true to that self, there is no label that will fully define you. We only think we know one another. Others know only what we are willing to reveal.

It is not our responsibility to reveal all…except I think to our significant others.

What is our responsibility is to remember who we are and who we represent and be true to that self.

If by the end of the run, you can say you are who you have always said you are, I think you can chalk that up as a win.

When I was a kid on The Old Hyde Place, I spent a lot of time finding myself. Observing my parents and the parents of other kids. Finding what I thought were the best traits and shedding off those that didn’t seem to be me.

I will always be grateful to the colleague who reminded me how to keep the important stuff front and center.

Gael is right. We’re stuck with labels.

But they don’t have to define us.