Any­body remem­ber the old-​​school Dymo label-​​makers? I’m not talk­ing about the fancy elec­tric ones where you can type in what­ever you want before print­ing it up. I’m talk­ing about the ones where you turn the dial to choose the let­ter and squeeze the han­dle (as hard as pos­si­ble) to imprint it on the red or black vinyl tape. And G*d for­bid if you mis­spelled a word and have to start from the beginning.

For some rea­son I was think­ing about that label-​​maker this past week­end. And really, it started last week when I received a won­der­ful email from an old High School Friend (HSF) that I hadn’t heard from in years. She had responded via Face­book in regards to the post in which I admit­tedly found myself ques­tion­ing my pur­pose in life.

HSF talked about how, as women, we are always ques­tion­ing our­selves about what we truly want in life. That we’re always find­ing a way to label our­selves while simul­ta­ne­ously try­ing to achieve more than what we can phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally han­dle. And that, in the process, we tend to lose per­spec­tive of who we really are in the grand scheme of things.

For HSF, it’s a mat­ter of jug­gling mul­ti­ple iden­ti­ties. She’s a wife, a daugh­ter, a mother of three (beau­ti­ful) chil­dren. She’s also a free-​​lancer, a found­ing pres­i­dent of one of her alma mater’s alumni groups. Yet as beau­ti­ful as her life appears (espe­cially from perus­ing through Face­book), she admits that she’s still com­ing to terms with the “Suc­cess­ful Career Woman” label; espe­cially as she’s cur­rently stay­ing at home to with her three young kids.

The point of HSF’s email was not to point out how much dif­fer­ent her life was to mine; rather it was sim­ply to point out that regard­less of how we view our lives, we only limit our­selves by plac­ing labels on who we are or what we do. And fur­ther­more, why can’t we just enjoy the path that we’re cur­rently on and embrace who we are while trav­el­ing down this path?

I must admit, I’m still strug­gling to deal with the valid points that HSF has brought up. I’m sure it has to do a lot with the many years of believ­ing that “Moth­er­hood” was the end-​​all be-​​all for a woman’s liveli­hood. (I con­tribute this, as always, to the strong Fil­ipino cul­tural influ­ence that I iden­tify with.) And, even though I’ve accepted the fact that I can’t have bio­log­i­cal chil­dren of my own, I still long for some­thing to fill that void that Infer­til­ity has robbed me.

Fur­ther­more, with my recent unem­ploy­ment sit­u­a­tion, I feel as though I’ve been stripped yet another label that I’ve iden­ti­fied myself with. That “suc­cess­ful career woman” iden­tity flew out the win­dow the day I found myself sur­rep­ti­tiously with­out a job.

And really … that’s what this post was try­ing to explain.

While I’d love to “give up” those labels that I’ve placed on myself, I also must admit that it’s these labels that I’ve come to rely on to “ground” myself, so to speak, when I’ve oth­er­wise felt lost. It’s these labels that help remind me of who *I* am in the face of uncertainty:

• I’m a Wife.
• I’m an only Daughter.
• I’m a Sis­ter to my Brother.
• I’m a friend.
• I’m Filipino-​​American (1^st generation).
• I’m Catholic.
• I’m a nurse.
• I’m a writer.
• I’m infer­tile.
• I’m child-​​free after infertility.

When look­ing at who I am; what I believe is the cen­ter of my core … it’s pretty obvi­ous that there are those iden­ti­ties that I have no con­trol over. These are the iden­ti­ties that have been imprinted on my soul; the ones that I can­not change. The ones that I’ve grown to accept as part of who I am in this life.

Then there are the labels I’ve cho­sen for myself (Catholic, nurse, writer, friend). Those are the iden­ti­ties that, despite the years of time and invest­ment I put into them, I can read­ily let go. But do I really want to do that?

The prob­lem, as I see it, is when one of these iden­ti­ties has been lost; espe­cially at a time where I wasn’t ready to a) let go of that iden­tity, or b) accept that iden­tity for what it is.

Take for instance, the part of myself that iden­ti­fies with being infer­tile. This was one label I never expected to own. But the fact of the mat­ter is that after one year of try­ing to con­ceive (waaaay back when, it seems), we were unable to get preg­nant. By def­i­n­i­tion, infer­til­ity is the inabil­ity to con­ceive or carry a preg­nancy to term after 12 months of try­ing to conceive. That’s a fact. There’s no way I can change that pat of me; there’s no way I have con­trol over that situation.

But take the part of me that iden­ti­fies with being child-​​free after infer­til­ity. We tried every­thing that we could pos­si­bly do (within our own capa­bil­i­ties both finan­cially and emo­tion­ally) to give our­selves a bio­log­i­cal child, but that just never hap­pened. And because we thought long and hard about our other options, Hubby & I chose to accept that liv­ing child-​​free was what was best for me. And believe me … it was not an easy choice to make.

And because, she nails it right on the head … here’s how Pam from Silent Soror­ity recently described the rea­son why she and her hus­band chose the child-​​free path:

“It got to the point where the poten­tial heart­break was actu­ally more over­whelm­ing than the glim­mer of very small hope.”

In any case, my point is that with our deci­sion to live child-​​free, I dealt with hav­ing to let go of one cho­sen iden­tity and accept a new cho­sen iden­tity. I had to let go of that iden­tity of moth­er­hood that I held on for so long. and I had to accept that liv­ing with­out chil­dren, despite the incred­i­ble long­ing to have a bio­log­i­cal child of our own, was my new identity.

As I said before, the deci­sion to live child-​​free wasn’t a choice that we wanted to make. It’s not that we didn’t dis­cuss open­ing our hearts to adop­tion. Or open­ing our wal­lets to more infer­til­ity treat­ments. Sim­ply put, iden­ti­fy­ing our­selves as liv­ing child-​​free was a choice that we had to make. Hubby & I needed to weigh our options to decide if that the small glim­mer of hope was worth the insur­mount­able heart­break we’d already been through. Hubby & I needed to make this deci­sion so we (or rather *I*) could main­tain my sanity.

Because if I didn’t put that label on me, I’d still be strug­gling to deter­mine who I was … if I couldn’t be the mother I had always dreamed about.

And of course now … my new iden­tity cri­sis is to deter­mine what to do with my career. But I will take a page out of HSF’s book and learn to enjoy the jour­ney while I dis­cover what’s next.

How about you, Blog World? What parts of your­self keep you grounded? What labels do you place on your­self? How do you iden­tify yourself?