Name Tags and Other Temporary Things

or what happens when the thing that used to define you… doesn’t anymore

In the years after her husband died, Nora McInerny became known as a grief person. As in capital-G Grief. She wrote about it, podcasted about it, gave talks.¹ She became a kind of grief doula and co-founded the Hot Young Widows Club. For a while, “widow” wasn’t just part of her story. It was the story.

“There absolutely was a period of time in my life where the most important thing I could relay to somebody was that my husband died,” she said in an interview.² “They needed to know that, and that needed to be the first thing that they knew, because that was the most important thing about me, to me, in that moment.”

That moment lasted years.

I get that.

Uhm… let me introduce myself… let me see…

There’s something incredibly grounding about having a label that makes your life legible, isn’t it?

Especially after a big change when something disorienting or defining happened. The label helps you describe yourself. Helps you feel sorted out. Like, you know which column and row you belong in. It’s like a little name tag you slap on at the conference of life: Hi, I’m The Person Who [Insert the thing].

Maybe yours reads: “Newly single.” “Retired but not really.” “Recovering workaholic.”

After I left my corporate career, I needed a new name tag. STAT. You see, I didn’t just leave a job; I stepped out of a whole identity. And for a while there, I lost my column and row.

Then I found a new one. The “career pivoter.” The “midlife leaper.” The “look-at-her-being-brave person.” Man, did I cling to that name tag. It became my whole story. I led with it and told it often.

But, lemme let you in on a secret.

That label was doing double-duty.

It wasn’t just giving me a new shorthand. It was giving me cover. It was letting me hide my uncertainty inside a narrative that sounded more polished than I felt.

Because this brave leap I had made wasn’t part of a grand master plan. It was messy and personal, and the messier it felt behind the scenes, the more tightly I gripped the label. That name tag became the proof that I hadn’t made a mistake. That I still belonged somewhere — even if I hadn’t quite figured out where.

Then one day, while introducing myself on a podcast, I caught myself telling the same old story, and it didn’t feel right anymore. It sounded slightly off-key and somewhat incomplete. That’s when I realized I’d outgrown the name tag.

• • •

Sometimes we keep a label because we’re afraid to let it go. Or because it’s the only version of ourselves that other people seem to recognize. Or maybe because letting go would mean asking the question: Well then, who am I now? (very difficult question to answer)

That’s a question with no tidy bio line answer. Existentialists would say this is the very heart of freedom.³ We’re not fixed. We’re always becoming. But let’s be honest: that sounds a lot more inspiring in theory than it feels when you're lying awake at 2 AM, wondering what your LinkedIn headline should say now.

• • •

Nora McInerney still thinks about and mourns for her husband today. But life — and she — have moved forward. Being a widow is no longer the most important part of her identity.

“It's a bullet point now, and that's okay. It is not a value judgment. It does not mean it means less. […] Widow is a label, and it's one I'm really glad that I embraced. I still have that label. It's just not going to be the first thing on my name tag.”

I think about that line often. Not the erasing of a label but the quiet rearranging of it. Letting it be one part of the story, not the whole introduction.

I will always be the career pivoter, the one-who-reinvented-herself-and-started-from-scratch-again. But it’s not the headline anymore. It’s just one of the bullet points.

Maybe this is how growth looks. Not tearing off our old labels in dramatic fashion, but letting them fade gently. Maybe it’s saying: Yep, that’s still part of who I am. But it doesn’t even go on the name tag anymore.

✴️ Got any name tags that are starting to peel at the corners? Maybe ones that need rearranging — or retiring altogether?

🏷 Metamorph-ish

💭 not Socrates, but close enough

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” — Ferris Bueller (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off)

➤ Your weekly reminder to log off and eat a soft pretzel in the park.

🍹 reader shout-out

A warm shout-out to WAGO reader and poet,

Ceci Miller

. Ceci writes People I Have Been, a poetry Substack shaped by real life — the hard-won bits and the parts that sneak up on us when we're just trying to get through the day. After a long break from writing, Ceci returned to poetry as a way to move forward, not just to make sense of the past. Her poems aren’t about having it all figured out, but rather about finding a way to keep showing up, one honest line at a time.

Do check her work at People I Have Been.

💬 last word

If you're quietly shuffling your name tags around these days, you're in good company. Here's one from the queen of switching things up:

Everything is fine,
Lou Blaser
(Vice Deputy of Whatever This Is)

1. Nora McInerny wrote Bad Vibes Only. She hosts the podcast Thanks For Asking and writes Feelings & Co. on Substack.

2. McInerny was a guest on the podcast, A Slight Change Of Plans, hosted by Dr. Maya Shankar.

3. Sartre called this anguish. I call it ‘updating your About page and having a small identity crisis.’