As I lace up for the gym today & look at my inspiration photo on my fridge I am reminded of all the labels I have been given in my life.
Delayed
Slow
ADHD
Dyslexic
Weird
Bi-Polar
Eccentric
Chronically ill (Lupus)
Plus size
Curvy
I think of how these labels have helped me in my life. I was labeled slow & delayed in kindergarten because I could not jump (seems simple now but I had never been taught at the time) and I only knew my alphabet backwards. (Still have to sing the song to say it forward)
That label got me put in classes that put me behind my grade level in every subject. In 1st grade I was labeled with ADHD & put on Ritalin. I was so hyper that when this medication put me to sleep it was a relief to my teachers. So I was left to sleep at my desk thru 1st & 2nd grade.
By 3rd grade I was placed in Mrs. Wamsley’s class for the start of the day before being taken over to my resource classes. She was an older, strict woman whom many did not like because she didn’t go easy on anybody.
She took one look at me sleeping at my desk on the first day of class, slammed a ruler on my desk & made me about leap out of my seat in front of everyone. The class started to giggle & Mrs. Wamsley quickly shouted “is there something funny about a child missing out on her education?” The room went silent.
She then went on to question me in front of the entire classroom as to why I would go to sleep during class. She asked if I got enough rest at home, if I had a bed, if I had eaten breakfast. When I replied yes to everything she then asked again “then why are you asleep in my class Miss. Hawthorne?” I said I couldn’t help it. I was on medicine that made me fall to sleep soon after taking it.
She got quiet for a minute then told me that I would not be going to my resource classes that day or recess. I would be staying in with her. I thought I was in trouble & that day drug on & felt like a week.
As she sent the other students out to play she asked me to tie my shoes. As I tied them she took notes, she asked me to recite the alphabet which I did but backwards. I was a bit embarrassed but she seemed impressed. Then she handed me a little wooden puzzle kit & asked me to pull the pieces apart. Why was she asking me to do such simple tasks? She must think I’m dumb I thought.
Then she pulled out a book & asked me to read a page to her. I froze in fear. I put my finger on the first word & tried to sound it out, stuttering. The book was The Days of Holly Hobbie. As I tried to sound out the first word I could tell she was becoming angry. It only made trying to read even more difficult.
She then slammed the book shut, grabbed my hand & marched me to the office where she blew right past the secretary & demanded to see Principal Potter. He was a tall slim man with graying hair & happy eyes. He heard the ruckus & came out to see what was going on. “Come into my office” he politely said. “How can I help you Mrs. Wamsley?” He asked. “You can stop labeling bright students as slow & putting them in resource classes & you can stop gauging their intelligence based on mediocre tests given by tired, underpaid people! I’m old, I’m tired but I’ll be dammed if I let another smart student slip through the cracks. This girl is not slow she’s dyslexic & she’s not tired she’s over medicated. I want a meeting with her parents. I want her off all medication & I will handle whatever she brings. Just let me have her full day!”
Mr. Potter & I just sat there stunned. He fumbled with the phone for a minute & then hollered for the secretary to call my Mom. I wasn’t sure what to think. I knew my Mom was tired of being called at work about her troubled student. Mrs. Wamsley asked Mr. Potter to please arrange a meeting with my mom & guided me back to her classroom.
I remember feeling so confused as to what happened. What did slow mean? What was dyslexia? Was I going to die from it? Is that why she was so worried & wanted to keep me in her class? What was happening?
I went home that night feeling like everyone knew something I didn’t. When my mom picked me up from the sitters she asked me why the school was trying to reach her. I told her about my day & she said no way was I getting off medication. I asked her why & she said because it made me manageable. I had no idea what that meant but if Mom said I needed it, I must have needed it.
That night Mr. Potter called my Mom & arranged a meeting for the next evening but was vague on what it was in regards to. Anyways fast forward Mrs. Wamsley tells mom I’m smart, no need for medicine I just need more discipline. Tells her I’m not reading at grade level because I was dyslexic & that she was baffled that no one had caught it sooner. She vowed to work with me thru every recess & after school till I was caught up if my mom agreed to take me off meds & out of resource. Mom agreed to take me off my morning dose of Ritalin but not the evening dose. Mrs. Wamsley said fair enough & a deal was struck.
I had no idea what I was in for. All the sudden this little warden made me her project. She didn’t let me slide on anything. Other teachers would reward me for every little thing & were very light on punishment because I was labeled “slow” but not Mrs. Wamsley. She pulled no punches.
You want to be a nurse or a housekeeper Miss. Hawthorne? You want to live in a house or a box? Do you want to live your whole life in your own little world where everyone gives you special treatment & never challenges you? She kept me in from every recess & after school an hour everyday.
I didn’t know why she was picking on me. I just knew I didn’t like her. I missed my resource classes where I could nap in peace & get little rewards for easy stuff. I didn’t like full day classes w this teacher that obviously had it out for me.
Well by the end of 3rd grade I had gone from being labeled slow & delayed to reading at grade level, writing almost all my letters forward instead of backwards & I could even jump rope. On the last day of class she told me to not let anyone label me. She told me that my scores on the big test she pushed me to take (an IQ test) were not below average in fact they were far above & that she was not surprised one bit. She told me that the world would not challenge me in the ways I needed for growth. That school would always be a chore for me but that it did not dictate my intelligence & that I could be anything I wanted to be. (Which at the time was an astronaut until the Challenger exploded the next year)
All of the sudden everything made sense. This woman didn’t hate me. In fact she cared a great deal for me & most importantly she believed in me & I have never been the same. I wish I would have heeded her advice to not let labels dictate my life. She knew I would be given many. I went back to visit Mrs. Wamsley often till I moved away at 13. I cried the day I saw her obituary in the paper. They don’t make enough Mrs. Wamsleys.
Years later as my parents were going through an ugly divorce & I was going through puberty accompanied by horrendous heavy 9 day periods & a tumultuous teenage long term relationship, I was a rollercoaster of emotions. A doctor diagnosed me as bi-polar & I was again put on medication. I was pretty numb & medicated through my sophomore year. Later I was shipped to California to stay w relatives, shipped to Georgia to stay w my Aunt DeNene & eventually shipped home to be picked up from the airport & dropped off at a drug rehabilitation facility where they were told I had a drug problem & my boyfriend Cliff was my dealer. (The straight A student who had never even smoked a cigarette & mind you I had never even tried beer or anything)
My parents were going through an ugly divorce and neither one of them wanted my overly emotional, unstable self interfering with their new single social lives, so I was placed in the center under the pretense that I had emotional problems and a drug problem. One was true. One was not. I continually denied ever doing a drug in my life the entire time I was there. They poked me, prodded me, drug tested me and group therapied me all while telling me the sooner I could admit I had a drug problem the sooner I would get out. I remained adamant I had never done a drug. Meanwhile new roommates were being added to the facility on a nightly basis some drug in in handcuffs screaming and yelling, throwing up, cutting themselves in the shower, pulling their own hair out. I just remember thinking not only have I never done a drug but I never will do one if this is what it does to you!
After a while they started letting me go on home visits to my dads house where I spent the weekend with Cliff. I didn’t see much of either parent on these visits & when I would return the staff would quiz me as to what I did during these visits. When I told them I had been with Cliff (my supposed drug dealer) they would drug test me and it came back negative every time. After several months of this and some individual therapy my therapist pulled me and my parents into a room and said they had two options. It was clear I did not have a drug problem and Cliff was not my dealer. It was also clear that when they sent me home for home visits neither parent had any desire to spend time with me so it seemed inappropriate to send me home, but they could not keep me in a drug treatment facility for emotional problems. It would be considered insurance fraud. So their options were to risk insurance fraud charges & leave me there or allow the center to emancipate me as an adult and send me off on my own.
My parents signed the paper and the following week I was handed a check for $900 and put on a bus to Ogden. I still had a year and a half of high school to go, I had no job & no where to live. I got a ride to my Dads where I picked up my car (a white 1985 Buick Century w different colored fenders from all the accidents I had been in) that became home for a while as I checked myself back into school and got a job at Denny’s waitressing nights.
One night an old man came in talking about one of his rental properties being a thorn in his side. When I asked him about it he said he had a rental downtown and the last tenants changed the oil of their Harley in the middle of the living room floor and the cockroach problem was getting out of hand and he wasn’t sure if he’d find anybody willing to rent it. I asked him what it was renting for and he said $375. I told him I was a minor and had been unable to find anybody willing to sign a lease with me because of my age. (16) He happily pulled a lease out of his trunk and away I went to my first apartment. That kind man showed up two days later and filled my fridge with groceries.
It was a hell of a place. It was the basement of a very old brick apartment complex in downtown Ogden with bullet holes in the windows and sure enough a giant oil stain in the middle of the living room. I only ate out of canned food because cockroaches couldn’t get in the sealed cans. It was filled with drug addicted tenants & had a constant flow of transient people crashing all over. But it was a home.
I was going to school in the mornings, working at IGA grocery store in the afternoons and waitressing at Denny’s at night. That eventually proved to be too much and I checked into adult Ed to finish my high school classes in the evenings so that I could sleep during the day after work.
I eventually sold the Buick in for junk parts and bought my mom’s old 1986 Camaro. I was off all medication, I felt good, I had made friends at both jobs and was almost finished with high school & looking into nursing classes at Job Corps. While my friends were still living at home with their parents and going to high school I was juggling adult decisions & running on a tight budget that often left me without but I was proud of myself.
Anyhow I digress. I just remember the diagnosis of bipolar following me wherever I went & whatever I did. No matter how well I was holding things together despite my trials I always felt different. I felt odd, strange & defective & no matter how well I fit in and how much I was thriving I felt inadequate. I never knew anybody else that had been diagnosed as bipolar except for a really strange relative who never really functioned on any level.
I realize now that that label not only followed me but it also started to alter my behavior. I would use it as an excuse for emotional outbursts or lack of tact or just odd behaviors overall. It almost felt like I was just filling the role of the label I’d been given. I later went on to work as a travel agent at my family’s travel agency and got an apartment with my long time high school boyfriend of five years. He was different too he hadn’t been labeled with anything but we just seemed to understand each other and adored each other’s eccentricities.
After a few years at the travel agency, seven years together & a couple of years of living together, we found out we were pregnant while we were planning our wedding.
The day before our wedding we found out our child had a massive birth defect. A few months after our wedding we had a full term stillborn daughter Farah Janel. Her delivery & the months after were some of the most emotionally devastating times of my life. No one ever even explained that your child could die inside you. I didn’t even know that was a possibility. Something shifted in me after her delivery. While I was horribly sad over the loss of our child, my moods stabilized, my hormones leveled out & I had a level of mental clarity I had never felt before. Shortly after that we found out we were pregnant with twins & 10 months to the day after our stillborn daughter was born we delivered healthy fraternal boy/girl twins. 
We both got a job at America Online where we were making really good money, we bought our first home & everything seemed good, but I had this nagging feeling that this bipolar monster was hiding in me somewhere & was going to be unleashed at any time. I had heard it was hereditary so I secretly set up an appointment with a counselor to find out more about bipolar disorder. I had never told anyone I had ever been diagnosed with it but if I was going to tell my loved ones or if I had passed this along to one of my children I needed to know more about it. I met with the counselor a few times & he asked if he could do a full mental evaluation to make a diagnosis of his own. I agreed & after several hours of testing & months of weekly visits, it was his diagnosis that I had been misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder & that I was suffering extreme anxiety & situational depression due to heavy periods & my parents divorce when I had been diagnosed.
He felt that I should seek treatment for severe attention deficit disorder but told me that as long as I felt good & that I was handling things as they came at me that he didn’t feel any medication was necessary for any type of mental illness. This conclusion was reiterated in 2010 when I went for a mental evaluation for a learning disability in college. The psychiatrist there said I had the worst case of adult ADD he had ever witnessed after learning I had had 54 jobs & moved 32 times. (I just thought I liked change) lol
Anyways I left that first doctors office that day feeling like a different person. This bipolar secret that had been hidden in me & had been a part of me for many years was all the sudden just released, I wasn’t weird, I wasn’t ill, I wasn’t defective. I wasn’t all these labels I had given to myself because of the stigma that came with that one word.
All of the sudden I felt more capable, I pushed myself harder at work & became fourth in sales worldwide for the largest Internet service provider at the time. I won awards, I went on vacations where I was recognized for excellence. My husband & I we went on to have another son a few years later. I tried to be a stay at home mom but I just could not do it. I had too much energy & was far too social to be home with children all day. I felt unchallenged & got super depressed.
A few months later despite an IUD we found out we were pregnant with our daughter & I panicked. I was miserable & failing as a home mom. Our son was just a few months old, we were struggling financially because America online had moved their facility overseas & nobody paid as well as they did. So I sat up & researched different ways I could make enough money to support our family. Cliff was suffering depression & spent most his time in the world of video games to get relief.
My dad was a mortgage lender & real estate agent kept coming up in my searches. I remembered the realtor we lived across the street from growing up, Diana Harris & how she was able to buy the most beautiful home on Main Street that I always loved. That night I decided to go to real estate school. I had my daughter & my in-laws agreed to watch her as I wrapped up my classes. I passed the exam on the first try. I joined Bess Realty in Brigham City & quickly realized I had made the right decision. I loved people. I loved architecture & interior design & I hated punching a clock. Even though the hours were scattered & were mostly nights & weekends, I absolutely loved what I did & I thrived.
We went on the have another son & we eventually moved to Washington (which had been my lifes dream since my senior year when I vacationed out there to visit a friend) I had been experiencing some weakness in my arms & some strange fatigue & other weird symptoms. I had seen several doctors who had misdiagnosed it as lymes disease, multiple sclerosis, postpartum depression & several other things but the symptoms got much worse once we moved to Washington. To this day I don’t know if it was the lack of sunshine or the stress of being in a new environment but I started developing a rash across my face & I became bedridden for weeks.
My new boss was absolutely wonderful. She treated me like her own child & when she became worried she referred me to an endocrinologist in Seattle. The waitlist was a mile long but he agreed to see me an& the minute I walked in the door he diagnosed me with lupus. Stating that no other condition would cause the rash I had on my face. He then did a kidney biopsy to verify the type of lupus I had which came back as systemic lupus otherwise known as SLE. All I heard was “death sentence” my aunt had just passed away of lupus & she had suffered many things through her short life because of the illness.
I knew there was no cure so there was no benefit in telling anybody. I came home told my husband I was homesick & demanded that we go back to Utah, despite us living in a beautiful home, both enjoying great jobs & the kids thriving in the much better schools. He was confused but all I could picture is me dying & my husband being 1000 miles away from family or any help with the children. 
We moved back to Utah & I started questioning everything. I had been with the same man my entire teenage years & adult life, I had not traveled to all the places I wanted to see or done half the things I wanted to do. Thinking I was running on limited time, I left my husband for adventure. I traveled, I dated, I bought a home, I renovated it from the ground up, I lost it in a Landslide, I lived in a camper, I lived in a high-rise apartment & I made a million new friends.
My new life did not even resemble my old life in any way. One day it hit me. Four years had passed since my diagnosis & I was still here. I was suffering random lupus flare’s but surviving every one, only being hospitalized once & being what my doctors describe as one of the lucky ones.
Well I had lupus. I had been labeled. I was supposed to die or be dying but here I was turning 40!  I thought back at all the major life changing decisions I had made based on this one label. LUPUS. While I am very grateful for the many changes that I have made & recognize that I have become a better mother, grown as a person, become a better friend & become a better person overall. I would’ve done it entirely differently had I not assumed I was dying. It was still no excuse to hurt those I love most but they have forgiven me & I’m working on forgiving myself.
Fast forward to today. I posted a picture of a woman who looks like I hope to work towards. She inspires me & my sister said I should be focusing on a more realistic goal for me & hang up a picture of a more curvy woman. It just reminded me of all the labels I’ve been given over my life & how many had proved to be incorrect. For some reason society has deemed all larger women as curvy when even the word Curvy means curves & we’re not talking fat rolls & double chins. I’m talking hips ass & thighs. 3 things I don’t have.
I had a gastric bypass 12 years ago and I got down to 159 pounds & when I stepped in the doctors office he deemed me as underweight. There’s very few pictures of me during this time because I looked terrible, I looked sick, I felt sick & there was not a curve on me to be found. I only wore a bra to hold the skin where my boobs used to be. I could wrap my fingers around my collarbone & count my ribs. I’ve seen my body when I lose weight & there is nothing curvy about it.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on body types. Rectangle, triangle, oval, round, apple, pear, whatever it’s just another label but I feel it is important to be responsible & acknowledge what our strengths & weaknesses are so we can set obtainable goals. If you’re a bird & you’re constantly trying to learn how to swim or you’re a fish & you’re constantly trying to learn how to fly you’re always going to feel like a failure. If I hang up a picture of a curvy woman with beautiful hips, thick thighs & a big butt, I could go to the gym every day but I’m never going to get any closer to that figure. I’m never going to obtain that goal. I’m setting myself up to fail.
So be careful of labels. I can’t think of any label I’ve ever been given that has helped me in anyway. Some labels are unavoidable they are just simply a description. Like fat. I am fat & medically I am considered obese even after a gastric bypass but I think the label of Curvy on women built like me is simply a nice way of making heavy sound like it’s a good thing. There’s curvy & there’s fat. But whatever you are no matter what label you’ve been given never let it define you. If you have bipolar disorder do a little research. You will see just how many gifts this world’s been given by people who were labeled as bipolar. Some of the most brilliant and amazing people I know are bipolar. Look at lupus some people get it and die within a year some people with it die of old age. Labels mean shit!
There’s some labels we have, like fat, that are fixable & other things like tall that are just how we are no matter what. I just think that it is important to shed the labels that we don’t want & embrace the labels we can’t change. I will always be tall, I will always be broad shouldered, I will always be a large framed woman, I will always have Lupus. I won’t always be fat but no matter what I will always be beautiful.
I found a woman online who had similar measurements to me at the beginning of my journey & seeing her natural weight loss of 129 pounds, she is now down to 6 feet tall and 185 pounds. She is my inspiration. She has a super thin tummy yet she is thick & fit. While others might not feel this is achievable by me I’ve spent 42 years in this body I know every curve, every strength & every weakness.
I know what I am capable of & what I am not. I am not capable of curvy but I am tall, broad & dedicated. I am very capable of proving everyone wrong time & time again! 😉
So think about anything that you’ve been labeled in your lifetime & how it has changed you or changed any decisions that you have made or how you felt about yourself. I encourage you to shed the labels, look deep within yourself & set mindful & obtainable goals & don’t listen to anyone when they tell you that you can’t. Let those cants fuel your fire.
Get out there & be the most badass version of your unique self you can be. This ain’t no dress rehearsal! 🤍

Landslides & Ladybugs 