“So you are a banker?” a relative asked, when I told him where I worked.
I worked at one of the country’s largest financial regulators. Five lakh people had sat for that exam. A hundred of us made it through. I was one of them, and I carried that like a badge.
“I’m not a banker, Uncle. We regulate banks. It’s not the same thing,” I said, a little offended.
He nodded, unconvinced, and called me a banker again ten minutes later.
* * *
At a family function some years on, a senior bureaucrat asked what I did. I explained in full: the exam, the role, the weight of it. He listened, then smiled. “So you’re a glorified clerk. Like me.”
“A clerk?” I said, my eyebrows doing the arguing my words couldn’t. “I’m an officer.”
He shrugged, said our work looked more like clerking than we’d like to admit, and moved on to the next conversation. I didn’t move on so easily. It sat with me for weeks.
* * *
When I left that job to start an educational institute, the question changed shape but not size. “So you’re a teacher?”
“No. I run the place. I’m the Director,” I said, each time a little more tired than the last.
Teachers worked for me. Being called one of them felt like being handed someone else’s job title. It still bothered me. I’d just run out of energy to keep explaining.
* * *
Then came the content strategy business. “I build strategy: the thinking behind what gets written, not just the writing,” I’d say.
“So, a content writer?”
By now I didn’t even raise my eyebrows. I just felt the familiar drop in my chest, the sense that no explanation would ever be enough, that I’d be having this exact conversation for the rest of my life, in every room, with every stranger who asked.
What frustrated me wasn’t the question. It was the label. It was always being placed below what I had actually built. I had worked hard to become something. But people kept seeing me as something smaller.
* * *
I mentioned it to my mentor one evening, more frustrated than I let on. “People never see my work the way I do. They always place me below what I’ve built. I keep explaining. It never lands.”
He thought about it, then said, “You have two options.”
“Tell me.”
“Go find every person who’s ever mislabeled you, and explain yourself properly. Keep doing that, for the rest of your life.”
“That’s not possible. There are too many people. And even then, some won’t agree.”
He smiled, like he’d expected that answer. “Then there’s the second option. Stop explaining. Stop caring what people think of you. Your worth isn’t theirs to decide. You decide it. Not them.”
Quiet Clarity: People will label you by what they understand, not by what you’ve built. Stop caring what people think of you. What matters is what you think about yourself.
Reflection: What label has someone else put on you that you have spent years trying to correct? What would it feel like to just stop explaining?
P.S- PS: This is the second of the five stories I'm calling Modern Clarity.
Small Town Stories
Genres: General Fiction / Contemporary Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, and Romance / Contemporary
Late Summer Weekend Reads
Genres: General Fiction / Short Stories & Novellas
