Life Next: Living Beyond Labels

8 March 2019

My daughter asked me a few months back.

“Mummy, why do you like to work so much? Why can’t you stay at home and relax?”

I told her because I love my work and you will understand when you grow up. I explained to her that I liked dressing up, going out, meeting people, working on new and challenging tasks and being financially independent. I told her I loved pursuing my passion for writing and it’s a dream that will never fade irrespective of my corporate job. I said that I loved teaching and that was my retirement plan. I would teach for free at the age of 80-90. I told her I loved working at home, be it cooking, tidying up the place or organizing stuff. I told her that I enjoyed working out and looking good for myself. It makes me happy. It makes everyone around me happier.

My mother’s solid advice to me was to be financially independent. No matter what the circumstances are. Like every daughter, she’s my role model. I don’t need to look elsewhere.

I am a content marketer, author, blogger, mentor, speaker, homemaker, and much more.

Even though all these jobs seem unrelated, together they form a unique career all of my own. A career that includes life-long learning and promises stability and excitement.

A career is a culmination of all the jobs that I do and how I weave them together to form a bigger picture.

In a nutshell:

Career is a reflection of me – my personality, values, and work.

Much has changed since… I changed

The above was what I penned earlier on Women’s Day in 2019. Much has changed over the years and the change has been gradual.

With COVID, my notion around work has transformed completely, even leading me towards paths I hadn’t initially charted. By 2025, I was genuinely detached from titles and labels on the professional front. I dropped the cliched ‘award-winning’ to my roles. I even dropped my job titles and roles because they don’t define the individual I am.

Stripped from all titles, I was genuinely happy being known for someone who produced high-quality work and had a creative, innovative, and optimistic mindset. Be it home, workplace, and elsewhere.

But I do have the basic roles on my social profiles, because I was tired of answering people what I do. People are curious for some reason, and people take you more seriously when you list titles, again for some reason.

Honestly, I wasn’t the same person I was in 2019. I don’t think work can even define my identity, like it did back then. 

Saying No To Labels On The Personal Front 

My detachment from titles and labels further extended to the personal front after the sudden death of my husband, Ryan earlier this year. When I got the news that he had a heart attack, my whole world suddenly seemed meaningless. Nothing really mattered. 

If I had my way, I wanted to be with him then and there, where ever he was. But there was no way that was humanly possible at this juncture. God alone knows when he’s kept my exit time on earth.

After his death, I told a friend how I couldn’t even absolve myself from worldly things, go off to some mountains and become a monk of some sort. I had real responsibilities staring at me. I already have quite a lot on my plate. But this life-changing event meant the entire responsibility would squarely fall on my shoulders. This was not the time to run away from them, but embrace them.

Ryan was a loving, loyal, and responsible man. He was also very light-hearted and supremely confident. I kept reminding myself,

What would Ryan want me to do? What would Ryan have done in my place?

I have my answers.

He was also very proud of whatever idealistic dreams I had—even when our interests never aligned. I had no interest in basketball like he had no interest in literature. Yet, he was proud and supportive, even when he didn’t understand. I know what he would want me to do now.

To go ahead and continue to make him proud from above.

I was also looking at my life in the past. Who was that girl before she met Ryan? What made her happy? It was time to revisit those two decades. 

But how can you remain the same when you are constantly changing as life unfolds? So I know it’s impossible to go back to the person I was before I met Ryan—just as it’s impossible to go back to the person I was with Ryan.

But what happens from this point is how I choose to frame my narrative. And that narrative is not going to be boxed by labels and titles. 

Yes, I still wear both our wedding rings on my finger. I sleep on the side of the bed Ryan always slept. I wear his home T-shirts and track pants. I have his jeans and linen pants in my wardrobe that I intend to wear. I have his picture on my work desk and two in the living room. I talk to his pictures and kiss them like he was in front of me. I don’t care if I look crazy doing so. 

I will always embrace and cherish our loving, good marriage. It was so good, especially at the end—the quintessential “And they lived happily ever after!”. We were just so contended in each other’s company. As much as I will always cherish and come back to this every day as my source of joy and strength, I know these labels of “husband” and “wife” are immaterial in the bigger picture of life. 

I mean to say these labels are no longer going to limit us from love in its truest, highest, spiritual form. The keyword here is “love”.

Nothing else matters except unconditional, universal love. How greatly you’ve loved, how deeply you’ve loved, how many have you loved! That is all we are going to carry forward when we move on from this life. 

Yes, I will always cherish being labeled a “wife”, “mother”, “daughter” or “author”, “founder”, “mentor” or whatever, but I see all these titles and labels as being parts of something much greater called “Love”. Eventually, we’ll detach from all these titles someday, and they matter far less significantly than love itself.

Being the highest version of yourself is essentially is being love.

This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026.