I have a confession to make. I've been living with a shameful secret for years now.

No, it's nothing like that. But it's still something that makes me cringe all these years later, something that makes me wonder to myself, "Who even was that? I don't know him."

But the truth is, I do. I recognize him all too well.

When I was in sixth grade, there was a kid everybody made fun of, Rusty Burgess. He was kind of a doughy, goofy kid who—I’m sure now—just wanted to be liked. But when I was eleven, he irritated me ... and everyone else. We might as well have hung a sign around his neck that said, "Reject."

It probably should have been hung around our necks, because what it really meant had less to do with Rusty than with the rest of us. And part of the tragedy is that once that sign goes up, it's almost impossible to take it down.

In retrospect, it probably should have read not “Reject, but "Rejected," because the bulk of the problem was our own inability to imagine what Rusty's life must have looked like to him. What it must have felt like to be the kid nobody sat with at lunch, not to be able to find a few crumbs of human kindness for himself. We were eleven. We hadn’t yet built up our empathic muscles.

(And if the news is a fair reflection of reality, some of us still haven't.)

Anyway, we were on the playground one day, and Rusty wouldn't go away. We were playing dodgeball or something equally profoundly important, and he kept getting in the way.

Now, of course, I'm pretty sure he was just trying to get somebody to notice him. It can get lonely when you want people to see your face, but all they'll show you is their backs.

So, I told Rusty to move. “Come on! Get out of the way!”

Nothing.

"Rusty, move or I'm going to punch you in the mouth!"

Nothing.

So, I punched him in the mouth. He crumpled to the ground in tears. I got frog-marched to the principal's office, and they called my mom.

When she finally got there, I expected to get a big earful. But what I got instead was much worse. The look on her face wasn't anger; it was shock and horror—like she didn't recognize me.

Part of my soul shriveled into a tiny bit of diamond-hard shame—deep, humiliating guilt that's added a number of layers over the years, but still has that little piece of volcanic magma burning deep inside of me.

Because, as I learned that day, sometimes the signs we hang on people are signs we might never be able to take off from them … or cleanse from our own consciences.

We know something about labels. We know what it is to be called by a name you didn't choose. We know how tidy it makes the world feel when we can assign a category and tuck a person away, so we don’t have to expend the energy to be curious about them. Labels keep the world manageable. They help us sort chaos into something that feels like order.

But once labels get pasted up, they rarely come down.

Sometimes the signs we hang on people get dragged around 50, 60, 70 years.