MM_E5 What's Left When the Labels Fall Away_AUDIO
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Dr. Julia Bowlin: [00:00:00] That's really what's left when the labels fall off. Not nothing, not confusion. All of it's still present, all of it's still true, just no longer needing one single word or one single checkbox to hold it all at once.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Hi there. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and you're listening to Mindset Medicine. This is your weekly dose of personal awareness. So I want you to take a deep breath and let this episode meet you where you are. This is the last episode in my five-week arc called Stripped Down and Still Powerful. We've been asking one question the whole time, just in different ways, and the question is this: Who am I underneath all the roles that I've been playing?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I've looked at it through familiarity, such as the identities that feel safe just because they're old and we've been wearing them for a while. [00:01:00] I've looked at it through prediction. That's the gap between the future our brain drafts and the one that actually shows up. I've looked at it through stories that we tell ourselves to survive through something hard, through that strange waiting space before loss actually arrives.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But today is different. This isn't a summary. This is where it all comes together, where we stop describing the pattern and start looking at what's actually left standing once all of the labels come off. A few months ago, I was filling out a home equity application. Straightforward paperwork, really, until I got to the box asking for my marital status.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Only gave me two options, married or unmarried. No widow box. And I scanned that form twice to sure I'd missed it somewhere, 'cause, you know, it just didn't seem option. I wasn't either married or unmarried. You know? There's no such thing. [00:02:00] But I didn't see another box, just those two boxes, and neither one of those boxes were gonna work for me.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Widow, I could have lived with. That word at least admits something happened to me, that there was a marriage here worth naming. But unmarried seemed to erase it. Like, unmarried sounds like my marriage never existed at all, and I wasn't going to click that box, and I couldn't, I kid you not. So I picked up the phone, and I called the bank.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I kid you not. And I remember trying to explain it to whoever answered the phone that I wasn't unmarried, I was widowed, and those are not the same word, even if their form had room for one of them really. It just felt ridiculous. Having that conversation out loud with a stranger, it was just weird, and it also felt like the most important phone call I'd make that day.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: While I was waiting on hold, just sitting with that form open in front of me, my heart was racing. Not [00:03:00] aflutter, actually pounding right there at my desk over a piece of bank paperwork. The room seemed to shrink around me, like the walls had drifted closer to me. My chest went tight right in my sternum, like something reached in and grabbed ahold of me.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: All of that from a checkbox that I refused to check. Because in that moment, I wasn't just filling out a form, I was looking straight at my own identity and realizing, "Oh, this label is different now." And not different in a small way, different in a way that reached all the way down to how I was allowed to describe my own life on a piece of paper.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And that's not a small reaction, folks. That was a whole nervous system of mine objecting to a word that didn't match what was still true inside of me. Wife, widow [00:04:00] Unmarried? Which one of those actually was I willing to hold onto or to change into or to fit inside? Which one felt too big to shift to? And that's what I wanna spend on this episode, because I think what this entire series has been circling around is what happens when the labels that fit us for years, or even decades in my case, or a whole lifetime, I was married longer than I was not married in my life.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: What happens when that stops lining up with who we actually are right now? And what becomes possible once we realize that the label and the truth don't have to match for both to still be real. I can't go to the grocery store without running into someone from my old life. Last week it was a woman I treated for 15 years.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: She grabbed my arm in the cereal aisle, just generally happy to see me, and [00:05:00] asked how I was doing with everything, which is basically in quotes. She didn't say the words. She didn't have to. I knew she meant losing my husband. And right behind her, practically in the same breath, another former patient stopped me by the checkout to ask about a hospice patient's family she'd heard I've been working with now, and she said to me, "I miss you being my doctor."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And then she said, "But I hear you're doing beautiful work over there." Two conversations in Kroger, my grocery store, maybe four minutes apart, and I was two different people in each one of them. To the first woman, I was a widow, still catching my breath, still handling gently. To the second person, I was a hospice medical director doing beautiful work, someone she respected, but had, in her words, lost as her doctor.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And then somewhere underneath both of those, the quieter part of me was the version of me neither of them was talking to anymore, the family [00:06:00] doctor who used to know their grandkids' names, the one who built 20 years of relationships that don't just end because my job title changed. Standing there in the cereal aisle, I felt the loss of that version of me almost more than I felt seen by the other two people looking at me I was just stripped down.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I used to leave the grocery store some days feeling like I needed a minute in my car before I could even drive home. Honestly, not because anyone was unkind, everybody was kind, but because kindness doesn't change the fact that I was being handed a different label every few feet, and none of them were wrong exactly.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: They just weren't the whole thing. And I don't think this is just a widow thing or a career-changing thing. I think it happens anytime a big shift splits people's sense of us into the before and after, [00:07:00] right? A friend who runs into a former coworker after a layoff and has to decide which version of their career story to tell.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The person who bumps into an old ex's friend after a divorce and gets asked, "How are things going?" Right? In a tone that assumes they know exactly which way things are going. Maybe it's a retired athlete who gets called by its nickname from a team they haven't played on in a decade Different circumstances, same disorientation.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Being multiple people at once in front of someone who's only ever known one of them. And here's the pattern worth naming. We assume identity should hold one shape at a time. One label cleanly replacing the last one, like a name tag we peel off and swap out. So when three different versions of [00:08:00] us show up in the same afternoon, like they did for me in the cereal aisle, in the checkout aisle, and actually even in the meat aisle when my elderly patient hugged me at that same day, we treat it like something's gone wrong, like we should have picked a lane by now.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But that's not how life actually works. I didn't stop being a doctor who knew someone's entire grandkids the moment I took my hospice title. I didn't stop being married the day the funeral ended. Those didn't get replaced. They got layered, one on top of another, all still present, all still true, whether or not any single person standing in front of me could see all of it at once.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And the exhausting part was never the labels themselves. It was being handed one piece of myself at a time by people who each only had access to their own piece of me, and feeling like I owed each one of them [00:09:00] the version of me they remembered on command, with no warning, in the middle of a grocery run.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's a little like being asked to answer a phone call while three other people are talking to you in the same time in different rooms. Nothing about the call is wrong. It's just a lot all at once, and there isn't a version of you fast enough to hold every conversation the way each person expects. I hope this is making sense because when we feel that exhaustion, that pull to be multiple things at different times, the kind that sends us back to the car for a minute that we have to take a breath deep before we can drive home, we tend to assume we're the ones managing it badly, that we can't handle all these different roles that we may have, that we should have integrated by now or explained ourselves better or [00:10:00] found a tidier way to be one consistent person for everybody.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: We rarely stop to consider that the expectation itself might be the problem, that maybe nobody is supposed to hold that many labels in front of that many people and make it look effortless. The disorientation doesn't mean our identity is broken. It means simply there's just more of us now than there used to be.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: More history, more roles, more true things, more shifts, and no single conversation, not even a friendly one in the cereal aisle, was ever going to be big enough to hold all of it at once. So here's the shift that I've come to lean on. Identity was never supposed to be one label at a time. It was supposed to be more like layers of sediment, each version of us pressing down and settling under the next without ever fully [00:11:00] disappearing.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The doctor who knew the grandkids' names is still in there. The wife is still in there. They didn't get erased by what came after. They got built on top of it. The mistake isn't having multiple true things about ourselves. The mistake is expecting any single conversation, a cereal aisle, a checkout aisle, a bank form with two checkboxes, to hold all of them at once.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And no four-minute conversation was ever built to carry 20 years of relationships and marriages and a whole new career all at the same time. And that's not a failure of the conversation or of us. That's just more weight than one moment was ever meant to hold. So this story isn't just to tout my own horn or my own discomfort.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I just wanna show you something, because once I saw it that way, the grocery store [00:12:00] stopped feeling like a test I kept failing. I wasn't required to be one consistent, tidy version of myself for that woman in the cereal aisle or for the person in the meat aisle or the one at the checkout or anyone else I ran into that day.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I was allowed to let each conversation hold whatever piece of me it had room for, and trust that the rest of me was still there, still true, whether or not that particular person could see it. That's really what's left when the labels fall off. Not nothing, not confusion. All of it's still present, all of it's still true, just no longer needing one single word or one single checkbox to hold it all at once.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The widow label doesn't cancel out the wife who came before it. The hospice title doesn't erase the family doctor who came before that. Every one of those versions of me is still standing somewhere, [00:13:00] somewhere in sight of me, load-bearing, whether or not the label on the outside keeps up with it all And maybe that's the real work of a season like this.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not choosing which label is the true one and not waiting for the world to catch up with a better word to label us. It's actually learning to carry all of it ourselves quietly, the way I eventually learned to walk out of that grocery store without needing the car, without needing a minute to recover from being three different people in ten minutes.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The label was only ever a shorthand. We were always the whole sentence. And I wanna slow down here for a moment because there's a reason that both of these moments hit the way they did for me. The checkbox, the cereal aisle, the racing heart, the room feeling smaller, the need to sit in the car before I could drive home.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: None of that was an overreaction. That was my [00:14:00] brain doing something very specific, and it's worth naming because it shows up anywhere a label carries more weight than the word itself. Because here's what was actually happening. Our brains don't just store facts, they attach meaning to them, and once a word gets loaded with enough meaning, the word and the meaning start to feel like the same thing.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: For thirty-seven years, married wasn't a checkbox. It carried a whole history inside of it, and family doctor wasn't just a job title. It carried twenty-six years of people knowing who I was in that identity, and I knew them all the way down to the grandkids' names in that identity. The brain doesn't easily separate a label from everything else it's come to represent.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So when that form only offered unmarried, it wasn't just asking me to pick a box. It was asking me to [00:15:00] let go of everything I'd quietly packed into the other word without offering me any way to put it. And when that woman in the cereal aisle called me her doctor in past tense, my brain wasn't just hearing a comment.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It was registering the loss of everything that word used to hold for me. This is called meaning assignment, the way our minds attach significance to a word, the title, or the role until we stop being able to tell where the label ends and the truth begins. It's not a flaw. It's how the brain makes a complicated life feel simple enough to hold.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: One word standing in for twenty years or thirty-seven years is very efficient, right up until the word changes and the meaning doesn't know where to go. But here's the shift. The meaning was never actually inside the word. I put it there, [00:16:00] which means when a word stops fitting on a form, in a grocery aisle, or anywhere, the meaning doesn't disappear with it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's still mine to carry, whether or not there's a checkbox for it, whether or not the person standing across from me remembers to ask about all of it at once. This isn't proof that something's wrong with me or that I'm stuck or that I haven't moved forward enough. It's just a pattern. The meaning wrapped around the word is the important thing here, and once I could see that the meaning was never the words to keep, it stopped needing the word to be true In other words, unmarried for them meant a very different thing to me.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I keep thinking about the cursor hovering over that box. For a while, I really believed if I could just find the right word, wife, widow, whatever, I'd start feeling settled again. [00:17:00] Like settling was hiding inside the label somewhere, and I just hadn't found it yet. But that's not what actually helped. What helped was giving up finding the right word at all.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The form says unmarried. I know what's true for me. Both of those get to exist at the same time. The form doesn't need to agree with me for what I know to still be true. It was the same thing in the cereal aisle. I used to leave those conversations replaying them, wish that I'd said something different, wishing the woman had known to ask about the other parts of me too.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Wishing I could have been all three versions of myself in a four-minute conversation so that nobody walked away with a portion or a fracture of the whole picture. But nobody gets the whole picture in four minutes, not because they don't care, but because that's not what a grocery store conversation is built to hold.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So now, when something doesn't fit, a label, a role, some old way that people expect me to [00:18:00] describe my life, I don't argue with it anymore. I don't need the cereal aisle to hold all of me. I just notice it doesn't fit anymore. Let that person have whatever piece they came for and keep going. That's really the whole shift.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not finding the right box, not needing one. And here's a place to pause if it's useful. If there is a label sitting on you somewhere right now, from a form, from other people, from your old rules that doesn't fit anymore, I want you to think about that. It's not something you need to fix today, just something worth noticing.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Before we move on to the next part, if it's new to you, I wanna explain the unicity moment. This moment is a short guided experience. It's part hypnotherapy, part nervous system reset, part simply just making space. It isn't therapy, and it isn't a [00:19:00] replacement for therapy. What we're about to do is a guided experience, an invitation to slow down and turn inward and remember you're always in control.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You can open your eyes at any time, adjust your position, or simply listen without participating. There's nothing you have to do. Just receive what's useful and leave the rest. Again, this isn't a substitute for therapy. If something difficult comes up for you and you need support, please reach out to someone you trust or a licensed therapist.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And if today just isn't the day for this, that's completely fine too. Just skip ahead. You're welcome to do so. If you're driving or operating machinery, don't close your eyes, folks. That's just common sense. Just listen and stay present on the road, okay? All right. Wherever you are, let your body settle in just a little more than it was a moment ago.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: There's nowhere else you need to be for the next few minutes. Start wherever you are right now, [00:20:00] noticing your feet first, the floor, the shoes, the ground holding them up, and let your attention rest there for a moment. Just let it rest there at your feet on the floor before we move anywhere else Now let your attention travel up slowly, the weight of your legs, however they're positioned, and the place that you're sitting or lying, taking your weight without asking anything of you.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Perhaps your hands could unclench a little bit and relax, especially if you're holding something. Perhaps your jaw starts to loosen if it was tight, and there's nowhere for any part of you to hold onto right now
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And let your attention settle lastly in your chest, just noticing your breath [00:21:00] rise and fall. You don't need to change it. You don't need to slow down or deepen. Just watching it do what it already knows what to do And picture if you're willing, a room with many doors. Not a hallway to walk down, just a room, quiet, maybe familiar somehow, with doors on every wall.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You might notice a light in that room or the temperature of the air or whatever sounds might be nearby, near or far. There's no right image. Whatever arrives is enough And each door in that room might hold a version of you. One door for who you were before a loss or before a big change [00:22:00] One for who you became as a result of that change One for whatever's still taking shape, maybe still unnamed, maybe still finding its own door to stand behind There may be no need to choose one door or close the rest.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: No need to stand in only one room at a time. Perhaps there's just a noticing instead of being behind the one holding the whole house. Every door, every version of yourself still there, still standing, whether or not anyone else can see the whole floor plan. All of you being held in this house, many different places of your life, old, [00:23:00] new, changing
Dr. Julia Bowlin: If a name or a label drifts by that no longer fits you anymore, maybe it was a word somebody else used to describe you or a box on a form, an old title perhaps, an old role you used to carry. Mother, sister, lover, spouse, friend, worker, colleague. It might simply pass by without needing any arguments. It doesn't get to decide what's true, doesn't decide what belongs to you because you are just you.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: There's no decision-making here. However this feels, full, quiet, unclear, or [00:24:00] nothing at all, let it be exactly what it is and was. There's nothing to solve here. We're just noticing the parts of ourselves
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And slowly start to feel the edges of your present room around you, the present surface beneath you, the present temperature of the air around you. And when you're ready, no rush, just gently let your eyes open up
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Whatever labels we've worn and whatever ones are still finding us, may we remember we were always more than any single one of them. This episode was never really about a checkbox or a grocery store or any one label. It was about everything [00:25:00] that's still true in us, even when the world only has room to see one piece of us at a time.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: If you've been carrying more than one version of yourself lately, grieving one while stepping into another, missing maybe who you were while still becoming who you're becoming, there's nothing wrong with us when we do this. We were never meant to be one tidy little label. You were always the whole sentence.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: This episode wraps up our stripped down and still powerful season. This was five weeks of looking at who we are underneath our roles, the plans, the waiting, the giving, and the letting go. If any part of this series meant something deeply real, I'd love to hear about it. You can also find me at juliabullenmd.com or in any of my social links that are listed in the show notes.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Next month, we're starting [00:26:00] something new, and I can't wait to bring you along. Thank you for spending time with me. Until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.
Outro: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about Mindset Medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional life.
