Labels

People love labels - specially in the South where I live. You are not your own person - you are always someone's friend, sister, brother, husband, daughter, enemy, neighbor, etc. When I first moved to Charlotte, I got asked 3 questions over and over again:

1) Are you married?
2) How many kids do you have?
3) Which church do you go to?

From those 3 questions many labels were formed - none of them particularly nice. Over the last 10 years that I have lived here, they have not gotten any better. So today I ponder why do we make labels? Why do people have to fit into little pretty boxes in our mind?

This is a human thing I suppose. It seems that as we get older, those boxes become more and more important to us and more and more rigid. I wonder what would happen to us if all labels were removed. Sometimes I worry that the labels define us too much - to the point of where if someone is labeled a "bitch" so to speak, are they really a bitch or do they become a bitch because everyone else expects them to be like that? I don't know the answer to that question. I would like to think that I am my own person and my actions are independent of all labels, but I think it would be naive to believe that.

Wouldn't it be nice if we all woke up one day and somehow misplaced all of our labels? If we weren't able to remember who fits in which box and just treated everyone the same? I know it won't ever happen - but it would be a nice thought =)