All the Pieces of Me

When we encounter someone or something new, we try to fit them into nice little neat boxes.  We're human (and specifically American); it's what we do.  I consider the ability to approach something new and not try to fit it into a proper little space in our frame of experience a super human strength.  It's our nature or maybe just our thorough conditioning.  We want a label to make things easy.

We don't just do it when we meet someone new (insert related discussion on race).  We also do it with seemingly mundane things.  I, for one, even find myself doing it with my own songs.  Last week for example, someone complimented me on a new song.  As they were trying to distinguish which one they meant, I said "the happy one?"  The song was just days old and still I had already labeled it.

I find myself doing it while writing songs too in a way.  I try o to pin down one of my labels, one of my emotions, one of my states of being, and write about it.  After all, music is about being in the moment and typically I write because of a particularly strong emotion in a specific moment.

The funny thing is that no matter how much I try to label things or put them into nice little boxes I can't.  A song about anger or resilience might have fear or guilt bleed through.  I might write a playful song and feelings of hesitancy or resentment might peek out.  I am apparently not as simple as I'd like to think.  Through writing and songwriting I've come to appreciate more greatly the complexity of human emotions.  It's easy to see how thinking about a single moment can stir feelings of anger, sadness, betrayal, disappointment, and fear.  But, it should be just as easy to look at an experience and feel (then and now upon reflection) simultaneous emotions of pure joy, guilt, regret, elation, fear, and sensuality.  It's that richness of emotiona and expereince that makes human existence so completely enthralling and worth writing and singing about.

And yet, despite understanding and now writing this, I find myself still try to label myself, if only to package who I am for others.  I try to say who I am, find ways and words to define myself.  I come up only with a list of things that I feel define who I am today.  Hopefully you'll see how difficult it is to confine yourself to labeling experiences so simply.  At one or many points in my life I have been any or multiple of the following:

A Hawaiian, a mixed-race person, an academic, an athlete, a singer, a writer, a student, the other woman, a depressive, the abandoned, the leaver, the desired, the desirer, the faithful, a loyal friend, a hopeless romantic, a strong minority woman, a scared little girl, the white-privileged, the impoverished, the spoiled only girl, a daughter, a sister, an aunty, a part of a cohesive (if slightly eccentric) 'ohana, a proud individual, the firecracker, a law student, the victim, the survivor, the short-fused, the girl who likes to smile...and so much more. 

I am, in short, a bit complex.

So you can try as much as you want to label me (I know I've tried), but I have all of these things in some piece of my being.  Every time I try to label myself, I realize that I can't deny one of these truths without denying them all.  I know I'm not the only person out there like this.  But, I think we can all benefit from admitting that we so rarely fit one label.  I know my music does.

Until next time...peace.