If humans came with taglines the way products or podcasts do, mine would not be some vanilla slogan engineered for mass appeal or tucked under a logo. Mine would be hand-scrawled in ink, worn like a battle scar, tattooed in spirit even before I knew I was born to fight. “Striped Soul, Sharp Mind, Sweet Rebel.” Seven words. Three truths. One human—me.

Let me break it down, not as a brand pitch but as a declaration. A reminder. A reclamation. Because for people like me—people whose stories refuse to sit quietly in someone else’s narrative—the tagline is not just a description. It is survival. It is identity. It is becoming.

Striped Soul. Two words, one metaphor, infinite tension. My soul is striped like a zebra’s back—distinct, unpredictable, and utterly my own. It is not symmetrical, not filtered through the lens of ease or simplicity. Each stripe is an experience, a contrast, a contradiction. It is joy marked by loss. It is strength etched with the scars of stigma. It is queer and spiritual, wounded and wise, scarred and sacred. I have lived with more labels than I ever asked for: gay, disabled, formerly incarcerated, amputee, neurodivergent, mentally ill. And yet not one of them could tell the whole story. My soul insists on being plural. It refuses uniformity. It thrives in contrast.

A striped soul does not apologize for being visible. It knows what it means to walk into a room and feel like the “other” before you say a word. It knows the power of showing up anyway. My soul is not just striped. It is striped and proud. It is a refusal to bleach out the shadows or pretend that any part of my story is less worthy of light. Every stripe is a mile walked, a lie unlearned, a truth made flesh.

And then there is my Sharp Mind. Not “smart” in the performative, trivia-night kind of way. Sharp. As in incisive. As in surgical. As in able to cut through noise, pretense, and illusion. I was formally identified as having High Intellectual Potential (HIP) and High Emotional Potential (HEM)—a diagnosis that explains a lot but boxes nothing. For me, intelligence has always been more than a test score. It is perception, pattern recognition, the ability to ask questions people are too afraid to voice. Emotional acuity, meanwhile, is not softness. It is not fragility. It is precision. The ability to read a room in silence. To hear the “why” behind the scream. To understand what someone needs, even when they do not have the words for it.

My sharpness has been both a shield and a sword. It has made me a target, because sharp minds make people nervous—especially when those minds belong to people society has already tried to discard. But it has also been my anchor. It is the lens through which I write, speak, organize, and advocate. It is what allows me to spot the hypocrisy in a sentence or the injustice buried in a bill. It is what gives me the power to argue with clarity, grieve with context, and hope with intention.

And now—the Sweet Rebel. My favorite piece of the trifecta. Because sweet is not soft. Sweet is subversive. Sweet is not a lack of edge. It is the daring to hold tenderness in a world built on cruelty. My rebellion is not loud for loudness’ sake. It is grounded. Strategic. Fueled by lived experience and sharpened through every injustice I have endured, witnessed, or refused to normalize.

I rebel against apathy. Against the lazy binaries of “good” and “bad,” “worthy” and “unworthy,” “normal” and “broken.” I rebel against the idea that people are disposable. That trauma defines you. That being gay, disabled, or neurodivergent is something to hide. My rebellion lives in my writing, in my advocacy, in every becoming blog post I publish. In every time I name stigma for what it is—a cage. And then dare others to smash the lock.

Sweet rebel means I can sit with a hurting teen and affirm their pain, then turn around and light a fire under an institution that failed them. It means I will bake a cake and burn down a lie in the same breath. It means I know exactly what is at stake when people are dehumanized—and I refuse to let that slide. This rebellion is not performative. It is not marketed. It is bone-deep and rooted in love. The kind of love that demands better. The kind that says “you are enough” even when the world disagrees.

This tagline—Striped Soul, Sharp Mind, Sweet Rebel—is not a brand I chose. It is one that grew with me, cried with me, healed with me. It emerged as I began telling my truth without shame. As I claimed my role as both a witness and a participant in the lifelong experiment of self-definition. It is the spirit of becoming, the nonprofit I am building to confront stigma with truth and dignity. It is the ethos of my blog, my public speaking, and my conversations behind closed doors.

Every time someone tells me I am “too much”—too emotional, too political, too intense, too opinionated—I lean into the tagline. Because this soul was never meant to blend in. This mind was never meant to settle. This rebel was never meant to sit quietly and wait for change to arrive. I carry these words like armor and offering. I share them as a mirror for anyone who has ever been told to shrink, to assimilate, to disappear.

If you have ever felt the weight of contradiction in your chest—like your joy and your pain cannot coexist—you too have a striped soul. If your thoughts move too fast for comfort, if you feel everything like a seismic wave, if you are always asking “why”—you too have a sharp mind. And if you believe kindness can be fierce, that justice can be personal, and that rebellion can be holy—you are a sweet rebel, too.

So no, I am not interested in a tagline that sells. I am here for the ones that save. The ones that speak. The ones that spark something in someone else. Maybe even you.

Because the truth is, we all carry a tagline. Some just have not named theirs yet.

But when you do? Let it be yours without apology. Let it reflect the life you have lived and the person you are becoming.

Because if we are going to wear words, they should fit like armor and move like freedom.