Don’t be defined by labels.

Anyone who knows me, knows that most of my life is about pushing against what people think of me.  Challenging assumptions and pushing past limiting beliefs. 

In raising my kids, I worked hard at exposing them to as much of life as I could so that they could develop their own sense of self and also not fit into a specific “clique” or category of people.  In my teaching, I often say that despite the alphabet soup that might follow a student, there are other students that don’t come with evaluations, diagnoses and IEPS.  Most of us fall outside of those boxes and as educators we need to identify the individual needs of each student and work with that in the context of the larger classroom. 

Even though this is one of my core beliefs - do not let labels define you - I still found myself caught up in trying to define myself.  The other day, my son pointed out that I was limiting myself. As is usually the case, your children can be the best mirrors. See, a couple of weeks into quarantine, I decided that I wanted to train for a 5K.  I have always desired to be that person that could run and get all the benefits that go along with it.  I have tried before and had thought that I just wasn’t the running type.  However, quarantine pushed me to set a goal for myself. Hopefully, to also build a healthy lifestyle habit.  

In my training, I would check my average mile times, the distance I was running vs. walking, what my heart rate was and then ping all that against feeling guilty I was taking time for myself and questioning if I was going to really be able to do this. Over the weeks, 1 mile turned into 1.5 miles. Then I hit 2 miles, then 2.5. I started to plateau here and I was disappointed that I could seem to get past 2.5 miles and that my heart rate was climbing.  Then my son said “don’t let the numbers define you.  Two weeks ago you weren’t running 2 miles and today you are”. I was taken aback.  I realized that I was so caught up in the numbers that I wasn’t seeing the progress that I was making personally. I have kept this in mind over these last couple of weeks and am proud to say that I did reach that 5K two days before my target date.  I have strong cheerleaders supporting me and am grateful for them. 

This experience has taught me that when working with our kids that have special needs we have to make sure we don’t get caught up in where they are “supposed to be” and what metrics we are measuring our kids at.  We have to remember that they are first children and not a project that needs to be worked on.  It is important to support them in their learning and development but we cannot define them by the diagnosis and challenges that they may have.