There's a particular flavor of outrage that shows up in expat groups around the world, and it goes something like this: "I am NOT an immigrant. I'm an expat." Forty replies later, several people threaten to leave the group. Seriously?

You lose your power when you allow labels to trigger you. 

I found this out the hard way when I landed in Peru and heard the label "gringo" used as a smear. And they said it with intense derision. Griiiiigo. Don't call me that!

Words contain energy. High-demand religions, former partners, and every manipulator on the planet know this. That's why, when you leave, they smear you with labels: apostate, weak, deceived by Satan, or backslider. Been there?

I can't change them. But I regain power in a dark situation when I don't allow the label to have authority over me. Gringo? That's right, friend. I am. Immigrant? Sure, why not. Apostate? No, just someone who researched truth claims and made a courageous decision, but you do you.

Your reaction either fuels the fire or stops it in its tracks. Choose wisely.

The Inner Circle Exception

With your inner circle: your partner, your close friends, your business partners, the five or six people whose opinion of you actually shapes your day. Labels and language are absolutely negotiable. If your spouse calls you lazy in an argument, that's worth a conversation. If your business partner keeps introducing you as "the numbers guy" when you've been trying to reposition yourself as the visionary, that's worth a correction. Close relationships run on shared meaning, and you get a say in the meaning. Don't let it slide with inner circle peeps.

And when they approach you with requests for certain pronouns, names, or whatever they might ask of you, if it's reasonable, try your best. A team member asked me to refer to them without reference to gender. I tried and eventually got it right. I owed them that.

But the barista? The guy on Facebook you've never met? The eleven-year-old kid across the street who yells "gringo" at every foreigner who walks by? Don't waste your energy.  

The wider population doesn't owe you linguistic agreements. Your energy is much better spent letting it go than legislating it.

Letting Go Is Not the Same as Losing

 Here's where people get confused: they think letting go of the label fight means the other side won. It doesn't. It means you stopped playing a game where the only way to "win" was to control something you were never going to control: other people's word choices.

As I shared in my book "Let Go," releasing the need to control others is the power move. When the word bounces off you because you decided it doesn't define you, you've just demonstrated that your sense of self doesn't live in someone else's mouth. That's a much sturdier place to operate from than "I will be fine as soon as everyone agrees to call me the correct thing."

Now Turn the Lens Inward: Language and Self-Talk

 Here's the plot twist. The label thing everyone gets worked up about, some stranger's word choice, is actually the least consequential language in your life. The most consequential language is the stuff running through your own head, mostly unexamined, most of the day.

If you're irritated about being called "gringo" but you privately refer to yourself as an idiot every time you make a mistake, you've got your priorities backward. That internal narrator has way more airtime and influence than any fruit vendor who hates North Americans ever will. 

"I always mess this up." "I'm bad with money." "I'm just not a disciplined person." Say that enough times, and you've built yourself a cage out of your own vocabulary, and unlike the gringo label, you can't just let this one go, because you're the one generating it.

This is the language that actually shapes how you show up: the sentence you reach for when you fail at something, the story you tell about why your marriage struggled or your business stalled, the words you use to describe your own capacity before you've even tried. That's the language worth renegotiating with the same seriousness you'd bring to a conversation with your inner circle — except the inner circle, in this case, is you.

The Same Skill, Two Directions

Outward, toward the world: let go of the language you don't control, because fighting for it drains you and changes nothing. Inward, toward yourself: take ownership of the language you do control, because that's the stuff actually running the show.

People who operate from a place of power aren't the ones who've successfully policed everyone else's vocabulary. They're the ones who've stopped needing to, because they've done the harder work of cleaning up the vocabulary in their own head, the one voice that was always going to matter more than the crowd's.

Let the world call you what it wants. Expat. Immigrant. Gringo. You regain your power when you act within your sphere of influence and let the rest go.