Check the Label - What's your box?

We make sense of our world by grouping and labelling what we see, imagine and feel. Each of us gets tagged in a thousand ways. We are ethnically, religiously and socially labelled. Our family, looks and education have labels applied. Job, skill and professional titles are placed upon our heads. The list is endless. These words are attached to us by ourselves and others in order to define who we are, what we know and how we should act in accordance with the label given.

We identify each other as having thoughts, traits and actions of a particular group. We pass judgement as to what is beautiful, ugly, right, wrong, fat, skinny, happy, shy, boring, rich, poor, intelligent, stupid and so on and on. However, these labels are meaningless until we give them strength. Words are just sounds until we apply social convention to infer a meaning. All of these meanings are nothing more than opinion based filters where the opinions come from our personal culture, environment, upbringing, family and peers.

In an information rich environment, we are looking to simplify the processing required and this is when the power of the label steps in. We stop seeing things as individual and unique but rather paint them with a broad brush, categorising, tagging and boxing them up into neat little bundles that we can then place orderly upon our mental tables. Generalising, stereotyping and reducing even the most complex and versatile of forms into nothing more than a name.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. - Shakespeare

The problem comes when we start to believe in the labels attributed to us or applied to another. These are given by friend and foe alike and repeated often to ourselves and each other. Adding value to one label, places strength upon them all and even those with positive attributes have effectively placed themselves into a cage as in time, that positive label may pass out of fashion and into negative territory.

We are not our jobs, our mood or our nationality. We need not let ourselves be willingly caged by popular opinion by identifying with the words placed upon us. We decide what we do and how we want to affect the world in which we live. We are free to be whoever we choose to be regardless of any label given.

I have been called many names and labelled time and time again. I still remember the first day at kindergarten where I was singled out and given a negative label. I didn't understand why as this experience was new as was the word I was called. I was upset, confused and hurt but in time I learned. The labels kept coming and continue to this day and I listen to each one as within them lies what I have found to be the true power of the label -

It tells me exactly who you are.

Taraz