Take a moment and think back to your childhood. Regardless of the condition, there was a strong unawareness to who and what you were exactly. You knew you were a kid with a strong sense of ego, but yet a strong sense of wanting to help others.
Fast-forward to your adolescent years where things started to get a little confusing. No longer were body parts just body parts. They started having names like boobs, chest, pecs, junk, and every other word under the sun. We started labeling things in our lives as we saw so that we could understand them.
As we progressed in our adolescence we started to inherit other terms for labeling things such as black, white, girl, boy, young, old, democrat, republican, etc... The way our culture has transpired has turned us into that neat-freak child that for some reason loves to play with label-makers. There's a label for everything, even the toilet paper.
When we grew up in our adolescence, we were so focused on labeling so much so that it fueled our teenage angst and got in the way of us finding our initial identities.
The definition of identity is summed up like so: the distinguishing character or personality of an individual. When we begin to label things, it hard to distinguish them as individuals. This is the issue when we are discussing topics like sexual orientation, gender, racial identity, socioeconomic status, age, and many others.
People do not fit in boxes. By continuing this excess use of the label-maker we are discouraging people from discovery their identities and interests. Boys feel like they can't take dance classes and women feel as though they can't be boxers. People in the closet feel as though they can't come out and people of color are always monitoring their behavior.
If we put down the label-maker we might start to know and understand people for who they are. In turn, we might also become happier since we won't be so concerned with this is this and that is that. Yes, it's nice to feel like you fit in somewhere, but don't fit in because you have similar labels. Find your niche based on who you really are and what you really need and want.
