People looked at me and saw only pain and sadness. They started watching what they said around me because they just saw me as a grieving teenager who had just lost her mother and didn't want to say anything that would make things worse. When I went back to school a few weeks after his death, I knew in the back of my mind that things would be different for a while. My cousin Bryce went back to school before me, so I knew he was seen as the kid who had recently lost his aunt and that I would be seen differently, too. There were people I had never talked to in my entire life coming to me, all because my label had changed to Abby, the girl whose mom died in high school. I hate that people change the way they are around me because my identity to them has changed. I shouldn't be treated differently because of how others look at me, I should be able to be identified as I want. Every human being is labeled in some way, some are labeled however they want, but most are given a label that they can't shake. After being one of the unfortunate people to be labeled something that doesn't want to be labeled, I have a different way of looking at people. In our English 110 class we read a story that I felt I could sympathize with. In the story Black Men In Public Space there was a young black man who was labeled dangerous because of his color and appearance. “It was also made clear that I was indistinguishable from the robbers who occasionally infiltrated the area from the surrounding ghetto” (Staples page 135). He doesn't want people to be afraid of him, he did everything in his power to appear harmless. Not because it wasn't harmless, but because it was perceived and identified as something it wasn't and didn't want to be. As a society we should be ashamed of how quick we are to judge people. We should let people show us what they do