We’re All Gray Sheep

For much of my life, I thought families came with black sheep and white sheep. The white sheep were the ones who fit in. They followed the rules, made the family proud and somehow understood what was expected of them.

Then there was the black sheep. The difficult one. The disappointment. The one who didn’t quite fit the family picture.

Many of us carry those labels for decades. Some of us were actually called the black sheep. Others didn’t need to hear the words because we understood the message.

But, lately, I’ve begun wondering whether we’ve been looking at this all wrong. Maybe there aren’t any black sheep or white sheep.

Maybe we’re all gray sheep.

Who Decided What Color You Were?

When somebody tells us who we are often enough, particularly when we’re young, there’s a good chance we’ll eventually believe them.

“You’re difficult.” “You’re too sensitive.” “You’ll never amount to anything.” “Why can’t you be more like your brother or sister?”

Sometimes the message isn’t spoken at all. A parent’s absence can deliver it. So can indifference, criticism, comparison or simply never receiving the encouragement we needed.

A child doesn’t usually have the ability to step back and say, “Perhaps this person’s judgment of me has more to do with their life than mine.”

Instead, we absorb it.

We take on the guilt of being the black sheep without ever considering that the people assigning the colors might have been colorblind.

The People Who Hurt Us Had Stories Too

This is something it took me a long time to understand. Our parents didn’t arrive on this earth the day we were born. They had childhoods before we ever knew them. They had parents who shaped them, disappointments they never discussed, fears they didn’t understand and wounds they may have carried throughout their lives.

That doesn’t excuse everything people do. Understanding isn’t the same thing as saying something was acceptable.

But understanding can change what we carry.

I’ve had to look at my own relationship with my father this way. For years, I could see what his actions had done to me. What took considerably longer was recognizing that somebody had helped create the man who eventually became my father.

That realization didn’t rewrite my childhood. It changed what I chose to carry forward from it.

Then I Had to Look at Myself

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Once I began giving other people the benefit of having a story, I had to give the same consideration to people who had dealt with me.

There have been times in my life when I reacted to someone’s words as though their behavior were entirely about me. I defended myself. I became angry. Sometimes I condemned the person right back.

What I didn’t ask was, “What happened before this person arrived in front of me today?”

Maybe their reaction had very little to do with me.

That doesn’t mean we should tolerate cruelty or allow people to mistreat us. Boundaries matter. It simply means another person’s behavior isn’t always a reliable measurement of our worth.

And neither is our behavior always a complete measurement of theirs.

Putting Down the Old Paintbrush

At some point in life, we have to decide how long we’re going to continue allowing other people to color us.

Maybe someone decided you were selfish because you finally said no.

Maybe you were considered unsuccessful because money wasn’t your measurement of success.

Maybe you were called strange because you preferred a different life.

Maybe you were considered too emotional when you were simply more sensitive than the people around you.

Those judgments can become part of our internal voice without our realizing it. Then one day, perhaps decades later, we finally examine them. Is this really who I am? Or is this simply who somebody once told me I was?

That’s an important distinction.

Forgiveness Doesn’t Require Forgetting

I’ve reached an age when carrying certain things simply seems too expensive.

Anger takes energy. Resentment takes energy. Trying to prove ourselves to people who made up their minds about us years ago takes an enormous amount of energy.

I’d rather use what’s left of mine somewhere else.

Forgiveness, at least as I understand it today, doesn’t require pretending something didn’t happen. It doesn’t require inviting someone back into your life. And it certainly doesn’t require agreeing that the person who hurt you was right.

Sometimes forgiveness simply means:

I understand that you had a story. I understand that your story collided with mine. I’m no longer willing to carry that collision everywhere I go.

And sometimes the person we most need to forgive is ourselves.

We’re All Gray Sheep

None of us is completely innocent in every story we’ve lived.

None of us is completely guilty either.

We’ve hurt people. We’ve been hurt. We’ve misunderstood others and been misunderstood ourselves.

We’ve judged people without knowing their whole story, while resenting people who judged us without knowing ours.

That sounds pretty gray to me.

Perhaps that’s one of the freedoms that can come with getting older. We don’t have to spend the rest of our lives defending the person we were at 20, 40 or even 60.

We can look honestly at what shaped us, keep what still belongs to us and put down what doesn’t.

Someone else’s opinion of me is none of my damn business. But neither is their opinion required to become my opinion of myself.

So if you’ve spent much of your life believing you were the black sheep of the family, maybe it’s time to reconsider the entire color chart.

You weren’t completely black.

They weren’t completely white.

Neither am I.

We’re all gray sheep.

And maybe finally understanding that is how we stop judging the colors and start seeing the person.

Also read, I Don’t Have to Dislike Who I Am Today to Become Better Tomorrow.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What do you think of labels? Black sheep or white sheep – what do they mean? Have you carried a label all your life? How has it influenced you worldview and your self-view?