I’ve been thinking a lot about risk lately. A lot more than I would have chosen, had life given me that choice. But it didn’t. Instead, life presented me with another set of choices.

I’ve always been very active, and particularly enjoy walking, hiking and bicycling. As most of you are aware, I fell a couple of months ago and sustained a minor pelvic fracture. I was told in very stark terms while I was in the hospital that in the future I would need to substantially limit or modify what I do. It seems, according to what I was told, that I’m now in a category of people labeled the “medically frail elderly.”

Clearly, there are risks associated both with allowing that label to define what I can do, and with not allowing it to do so. The risks of continuing to do what I’ve enjoyed doing for so long are obvious. Those I would incur by “accepting my fate” are more subtle. I can summarize them in one phrase: significant diminishment of my life. And of Tom’s and my shared life, because those are all things we enjoy together.

What makes this of more than passing interest is our culture’s continuing propensity for labeling people, usually with labels that are inherently limiting. My experience in the hospital was truly horrid. [This occurred while we were in Florida; it does not pertain at all to IU Health Ball Memorial, with which I have had uniformly good experiences.] As I’ve tried to process that experience, I’ve begun to recognize that I had been in the middle of a very toxic stew of sexism, ageism, and ableism, and I might be missing one or two more isms. The traumatization of being labeled and then treated on the basis of the category I’d been “assigned” to has proven to be far more distressing and debilitating in the long term than the fall itself.

In this culture we tend to label those whom we define as “cultural nons”: non-male, non-binary in gender expression, non-white, non-homed (i.e. homeless), non-employed, non-American born, non-able bodied, non-young… It’s a way we define people negatively, in terms of what they are not or cannot do, or do not have. It both defines and enforces otherness and othering. It describes people in terms of broad categories rather than recognizing that each of us is a unique individual.

Each of these labels also drags along with it assumptions which are also negative. I couldn’t even begin to process the events and feelings of those two days in the hospital until about six weeks after we got home to Muncie. When I did, I figured out that old, female, and disabled had translated into “mentally incompetent to make my own decisions” in the eyes of most (not quite all) hospital personnel. Rather than asking me about me, most asked someone else, or simply told me what was what.

I suddenly found myself defined in terms of all the things people assumed I could not/should not do. Being labeled as “medically frail elderly” and the laundry list of things I could no longer do caused me extreme cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a complex phenomenon, but one aspect of it is the “mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.”

The new information I’d been presented with was in harsh contrast to my self-identity as someone who is reasonably intelligent, older and female, yes, but hardly frail, and certainly able to think for myself! Because I was indeed in a vulnerable situation (which is not the same as “weak”), I was less able than I would otherwise have been to separate the labels from the reality that part of me knew to be true. For a time, I was a victim of what I might call cognitive identity theft. This is a microcosm of what we have done to vulnerable populations in our culture historically and currently.

Cultural othering is typically directed at these vulnerable populations. It’s one way the dominant culture maintains control over them. In our culture, it goes back at least to how the colonists treated the native peoples, and then to how slaveholders maintained control over their slaves. More recently, it’s reflected in the cultural control exerted over LGBTQ people and immigrants.

The links between labeling, cultural identity theft and control may be quite obvious to most of you. I “knew” it, yes, but the way in which I recently experienced it radically changed my perception of it. And it made absolutely clear the terrible things that happen when we deny the inherent worth and dignity of a human being, of any human being or group of human beings.

It also deepened my appreciation for our church even more. When I came back here, I was surrounded by people by whom I felt affirmed and buoyed up in spirit. You are helping me find my way back to myself. Thank you!

~Rev. Julia