The closest I came to getting into trouble at school was when I was six years old. I was colouring in large pictures of sunflowers and my best friend, Anna, wanted to borrow my crayons. I didn’t object to sharing in principle but Anna always put them back in the wrong order and I had a very particular way of keeping all my belongings.
I believed that every action I took had the power to impact my entire day; if I was to keep my pencil case on the left side of my desk rather than the right, my day would unfold in an entirely different way than it would otherwise. I really believed that letting Anna mess up my crayons could have terrible consequences. My teacher came over, but when I tried to explain she peered over her glasses and said: “You are a strange little thing!”
I wasn’t sure if I was strange. But I was quite certain that I wasn’t
a “thing”. As far as I was concerned, I was a paediatric oncologist in
waiting and an aspiring princess.
Those words stuck with me,
though. I was very self-conscious about the little habits that I felt
kept me safe. As I got older, the number of routines and rituals grew.
My self-consciousness worsened and the anxiety fed back into this
vicious, unsustainable cycle. I was labelled as all kinds of things:
neurotic, obsessive, psychotic, depressed.
When I was 15 and in a secure unit for the first time, I was told that I was a bad kid. We were all told that we were bad kids. This was the first time the rules and routines I’d developed to protect myself really clashed with the outside world. It seemed that whatever I did had the opposite effect to what I intended and I was trapped in a no-win situation. If I made eye-contact with someone, I’d be greeted with a hostile: “What are you looking at?” But if I didn’t make eye contact, it would be an equally angry: “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
For the first time in my life, I found myself getting into trouble constantly. I picked up new labels very quickly, without really understanding why. I’d be called aggressive if I made eye contact with the wrong person, as if I’d purposely picked a fight. I’d ask for a female member of staff to do the mandatory strip-searches and be called a troublemaker for interrupting tea breaks while they went to find one.
These labels stuck. And they hurt. Suddenly I’d gone from having a system to help me predict and control everything around me to feeling like no matter what I did, I was getting it wrong. The rules kept changing and I didn’t understand. I felt as though I was being turned into something I wasn’t. I was confused and terrified the entire time. The more I think about that time in my life, the more confused I get.
I have always felt like a fraud speaking about my experiences in the care system because I haven’t ever thought of myself as having been in care. I certainly never felt cared for.
When I was sat in front of the children’s hearing and told that I was going to a secure unit, nothing was explained about what this meant – except that it was necessary to protect me from myself. It quickly became clear that secure units are simply walls around what’s been identified as a problem and, to me, that isn’t care. Now I find myself with another label – care leaver – and I feel like a fraud, because I look back and I think: “Was that it?”
The problem with labels is it becomes difficult to see the person underneath, to see them as anything other than troubled, bad or damaged. I wasn’t seen as me, but as something else: a problem, something that needs to be changed, fixed or cured.
Not all labels in life are negative, of course, but each is still laden with expectations and assumptions about the person underneath, a person whose identity is far more complex than that. It’s so easy to judge or stereotype. But it’s not helpful.
The language we use moulds our thoughts and becomes the filter through which we see the world. Questioning the labels we use to describe people and thinking about what those labels mean is important because it changes how we look at people and, in turn, how we treat them.
When we’re not attentive to the needs of those around us, of those who are vulnerable or suffering, we create a legacy of indifference.
Words can build walls between people or they can create a connection. Words can break someone or they can empower them. Conversations can change people – for better or for worse.
The way we connect with each other matters. Where the power lies and who is doing the labelling matters, because labels have a funny way of sticking. Particularly with young people, and especially when they hurt.
And so, back to language. Back to calling children just children. Not damaged, not troubled, not broken beyond repair.
Just needing what we all need: safety, warmth, empathy, compassion, love. Genuine care.
By Ellen Maloney
16 August 2017
