What's in a label anyway?

I always think a lot about labels. I understand that we need them to find some way to classify all the information that comes to us, and that they play a part in helping us to make sense of the world.

But I also worry about what happens if we don't recognise that they are simply ways of helping us to make sense of the world, rather than the other way around. We can limit our perception of the world if we only go by the way that we have labelled it.

Think about the colour blue, the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky, the blue of a blueberry... they are not the same but it makes our life easier to call them all blue. We can use the word blue and understand its meaning but we can also appreciate the beauty in all the different shades.

Apparently, though, the way that we classify colours with our language can affect our perception of colour. In some other languages there are two words for blue referring to the lighter and darker shades. In some languages, blue and green have the same labels. A study of bilingual participants showed that when they were asked to sort items in terms of their colour, they classified colours differently according to which language they were speaking in!

As a nurse and an energy healer, I often feel like I am bilingual in the languages of medicine and spirituality. These worlds are so different that sometimes it feels completely impossible to translate. The language of medicine doesn't really have any words that acknowledge the existence of spirit so it just doesn't come into the way we classify things. So I often feel like I don't make sense here.

I have to work hard when I am in the hospital to shut off my intuition because in medicine we only go by what we can see and feel and the intuitive messages wouldn't make sense. I often feel it might benefit, but when the majority of your day is spent doing paperwork and giving out drugs the other senses are just distraction from getting your job done. In an emergency though, when all the forms and routines go out of the window then there is space for intuition, and when a nurse says 'I just know there is something not right' it is possible to get a team together quickly.

Apart from those times, I have generally spent the last 20 years as a nurse hiding who I am and gradually trying to pluck up the courage to share how I see the world. I thought that it was just echos of the witch wound making me scared to be true to myself, an old fear of being persecuted for working with the unseen and with the natural world. But now I'm not really sure it's just an echo.

In the spiritual world I might be labelled as clairaudient, which can be interpreted as 'clear hearing'. It is defined by Wikipedia as 'a form of extra sensory perception wherein a person acquires information by paranormal means'

This might be seen as a gift by some, but when I am working as a nurse it doesn't often feel like it.

So I decided to see a doctor to find out what my label would be in the medical world. She said that with the limited labels that she had available it would be 'auditory hallucinations' and a referral to the mental health team.

Clairaudience or auditory hallucinations? I could have a gift or I could be mentally ill, or is there a line somewhere between? I know I will be judged and treated very differently depending on which language you are speaking and the label that you choose.

I feel very lucky that I have learnt to trust in my own intuition, have learnt how to work with this and have a lot of like-minded people around me. But it hasn't been easy trying to hide who I was for fear of these sorts of labels. And I certainly didn't feel comfortable to ask for support in the medical world because of this.

I still see that one day the two worlds might communicate better and this could even be really positive. For now, I worry that people are missing out on the right support because of the limited number of labels available, and having to make them fit.

I worry about how this affects people getting support who might really need it.

And I also think a lot about how many other people are hiding because they feel that the world they live in would label them as 'crazy' if they were true to themselves. And how isolating this feels.

I don't have all the answers and this is a big area but I just thought it is one that is important to talk about.

I know I can't change the health system all at once and so many people are not getting the support that they need.

But what I can do is create more safe spaces where people are able to just be themselves.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has any thoughts or experiences around this.