When “Nobody” Becomes Too Much: Titles & the Fight for Personhood
In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus survives the Cyclops not by strength but by naming himself “Nobody.” The disguise works. When Polyphemus howls that “Nobody is hurting me,” his neighbors dismiss his cries. Odysseus escapes, but at a cost. For a time, he is unseen, unnamed, and unrecognized. His clever title shields him, yet it also erases him.
I’ve been thinking about this story lately as a parent. My son has dyslexia, and in the long hours of homework together, that word—dyslexia—becomes the center of conversation. At first, there is comfort in the commonality with other families who struggle in the same way. We compare tutoring strategies, share frustrations, and nod knowingly at each other’s stories. But slowly, what began as solidarity starts to feel like erasure. The diagnosis becomes his title. And suddenly, it is the only word people reach for.
I want to scream: my son is more than his dyslexia. It is part of him, as much as the color of his eyes is part of him. But no one mistakes eye color for the whole of a person. Dyslexia has shaped him, yes… but, he also has gifts I can barely imagine. He sees space and patterns in ways that I can’t imagine. He tells stories with wit and imagination. None of this is contained by his title.
And yet, how often do we reduce one another to titles? It is not just children with diagnoses. Adults bear it too. We call someone “patient,” “provider,” “professor,” or “pastor,” and convince ourselves that we have seen them. Titles become shorthand. They grant access, recognition, or authority. But, they also shrink. To love someone for their title is not the same as loving the person themselves.
The Double-Edged Sword of Titles
Medicine has wrestled with this tension for decades. Clinicians are trained to use “person-first” language—“a person with diabetes” instead of “a diabetic”—to avoid collapsing someone into their illness (Snow, 2019). I’m not going to lie. For awhile, I rolled my eyes at this; but, if you can’t tell, I’ve been forced to come back to this and reconsider. Research shows this is not just semantic. Words matter. Stigmatizing or identity-first labels in medical records can influence how clinicians perceive patients, reinforce stereotypes, and even affect treatment decisions (Goddu et al., 2018). More recent studies confirm that medical students themselves notice how easily language transmits bias, and that training in person-centered language helps cultivate respect and trust (Gibson et al., 2025).
Titles, then, are never neutral. They frame expectations, shape encounters, and sometimes distort relationships. In the clinic, calling someone “the heart failure patient in room six” may be efficient, but it subtly eclipses their humanity. In the classroom, identifying my son as “the dyslexic child” may be descriptive, but it risks defining him entirely by what he cannot do, instead of what he can. As philosopher Charles Taylor (1994) warned, misrecognition is not a small error. It is a form of harm.
At home, this is what the homework table taught me. The conversations that began with camaraderie soon became circular, as if there was nothing to say about my son apart from his diagnosis. Titles and labels crept in, and before long, the boy I knew (curious, stubborn, funny, tender) was hidden behind them. He was still present, but, in conversations with others, unrecognized. He was, in Odysseus’ words, “Nobody.”
Loving Beyond Titles
The truth is that titles can serve us. They help us navigate systems. They can open doors to resources, authority, or care. But they cannot carry the weight of love. To mistake the title for the person is to confuse category with identity, shorthand with soul.
What I long for(and what I fight for as a parent) is recognition that my son is more than his title. Dyslexia is part of his story, but it is not the end of it. Just as none of us are only “patients” or “providers.” We are each whole persons, irreducible to any one word.
Odysseus eventually reclaims his name when he reaches Ithaca. In the same way, I believe we must continually reclaim identity from the titles that threaten to overtake it. For me, this conviction is rooted in faith: every person is made in the image of God, known and loved in their fullness. No diagnosis, no credential, no title can exhaust that reality.
So whether at a homework table, in a clinic, or in daily life, the question lingers: will we see one another only as titles—or as persons? Titles may protect, clarify, or organize. But love demands something deeper. It asks us to look past the name and see the whole.
References
Gibson, C., Campbell, K., Kellett, K., & Linton, J. (2025). “You’re not taught to think about the words you use and then it just perpetuates”: A qualitative examination of medical students’ perspectives of stigmatizing language in healthcare. BMC Medical Education, 25(1), 690. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-025-06690-1
Goddu, A. P., O’Conor, K. J., Lanzkron, S., Sauder, C., Saha, S., Peek, M. E., Haywood, C., & Beach, M. C. (2018). Do words matter? Stigmatizing language and the transmission of bias in the medical record. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 33(5), 685–691. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-017-4289-2
Shaywitz, S. E. (2020). Overcoming dyslexia (2nd ed.). Alfred A. Knopf.
Snow, K. (2019). People first language: An evolving phrase to describe disability. National Inclusion Project.
Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition (pp. 25–73). Princeton University Press.
