Life's Labels

Life’s Labels

            Like Bone from A Bastard Out of Carolina, I was subject to the label that life has given me. Unlike Bone I was the one who choose this label, but not the stigmatism that came with it. Bone was labeled as 'trash' because of the family she was born into. Her community forced her to live with this label and would not let her deviate from it. From a young age I had known I wanted to be a cheerleader, but feared joining because of the stereotype behind it. In the 6^th grade I decided to look past this image that cheerleading presented of the dumb, slutty, bimbo, and joined my local cheerleading squad. I cheered from then on until I graduated high school.

“Other than the name, they got just about everything else wrong” (Allison 2).

           I was forced to have people assume I was dumb or slutty just because of the name associated with cheerleading. This was highly frustrating to me because I worked hard in school to maintain an A average and held myself to high morals, but no one seemed interested in caring about that. They were too busy off assuming I was ‘screwing’ whatever guy I happened to be friends with or cheating my way through. Bone was forced to take on the label of ‘trash’ because of the family she was born into. She struggled to identify with her family because her peers saw her as trash, but she did not want to have that label. She longed to be able to make a name for herself and become something in her family no one else had become before. She dreamed of becoming a gospel singer. A dream that was unattainable because no one saw her as having talent or beauty to become one. Had she been giving the opportunity to prove herself and be more than her label, maybe she could have become one. 

“All I wanted, I whispered all I wanted, was a piece, a piece, a little piece of it” (Allison 168)

            Bone longed to become a Gospel singer, something she discovered she was passionate about. Her good friend Shannon, put her down for this and made fun of her dream. Like Shannon, it seemed that everyone around me put cheerleaders down as “not talented” or “not a real sport”. It frustrated me that no one could see the hard work we put in at 7 AM practices or how late we stayed just to decorate the gym or stadium for the big game the next day. “It’s all short skirts and pom poms,” they would say. How was I going to be excited about something I loved if it was always being put down? Negative labeling is constricting on society because many people refuse to look past and change their views once their mind has been made up.

            Stereotyping can greatly limit how far someone can move in society. Bone was never able to push past her label as 'trash' because people would not allow her to be associated with anything other than that. What people don’t realize is that just because you may associate with something that hasn’t necessarily been positively viewed in the past, will not dictate your success in the future. I was a cheerleader and graduated in the top 15% of my class, had a considerable amount of community service and volunteer work, had a job, and managed to maintain healthy relationships with my friends and family. I was not dumb. I was not a slut. The label that life or we give ourselves should not define who we are and how far we will go in life. If society can break past the stereotypes, possibilities and opportunities will be endless.