I’ve had a lifetime of people labeling me as something and trying to enforce that label on me. When I eventually do something that sits outside of that label, those same people get angry at me for breaking the expectations that they set for me. Expectations that they never explicitly told me but assumed because of that label they placed on me.
As a result, I pushed back by “delabelling” myself, mostly. If I must label myself, I attempt to use the most broad term possible as to avoid cornering myself. Sometimes it’s too easy to use a label as a conversational shortcut.
As a personal result, I tend to avoid labeling others. In my mind that puts me on even level with the people around me. It avoids me talking to specific groups of people and allows others to participate in the discussion, no matter how those other people view or identify themselves.
I’ve watched how words, labels and categorizations have become weaponized and used to divide people. Which is absurdity. Words are ever evolving and dying so to me it seems pointless to allow words to strongly influence me.
These days I surround myself with people who are able to show me who they are over people who spend their energy telling me who they are. Real confidence doesn’t need to waste their time on only words. Those words should add to that person as a whole. That’s how I want to view another person.
Not trying to convince you to change your mind, I do see the value in using words or labels to find community, especially in times like these. I think you seem open to at least seeing where my unorthodox views come from.
Oh I totally get where you are coming from, I could have written a good deal of that myself.
I’d offer you a hug if I could.
I completely agree that labels, words for boxes we put people in… should as additive, in a good way, as possible, descriptors, not restrictors.
But I also believe they should be accurate, and thus, we unfortunately still do live in a society, and we thus to at least some extent have to keep playing this word game.
I view a term like Autist simply as a matter of fact classifier, and while I won’t force others to, I more or less use it as a self label, when it is relevant to some discussion.
My approach is ‘take the word back’ so that Autism Speaks and idiots who think the measles vaccine gave their kid Autism aren’t the only morons using such words, proclaiming to represent me… us.
We can speak for ourselves actually, we’re not all a bunch of invalid r-tards, and whether or not we like it, we are an extremely misunderstood and at risk minority group in much of the world… if we let others do all the talking, we shouldn’t be surprised that they continue to get a lot of things very wrong.
I’ve had a lifetime of people labeling me as something and trying to enforce that label on me. When I eventually do something that sits outside of that label, those same people get angry at me for breaking the expectations that they set for me. Expectations that they never explicitly told me but assumed because of that label they placed on me.
As a result, I pushed back by “delabelling” myself, mostly. If I must label myself, I attempt to use the most broad term possible as to avoid cornering myself. Sometimes it’s too easy to use a label as a conversational shortcut.
As a personal result, I tend to avoid labeling others. In my mind that puts me on even level with the people around me. It avoids me talking to specific groups of people and allows others to participate in the discussion, no matter how those other people view or identify themselves.
I’ve watched how words, labels and categorizations have become weaponized and used to divide people. Which is absurdity. Words are ever evolving and dying so to me it seems pointless to allow words to strongly influence me.
These days I surround myself with people who are able to show me who they are over people who spend their energy telling me who they are. Real confidence doesn’t need to waste their time on only words. Those words should add to that person as a whole. That’s how I want to view another person.
Not trying to convince you to change your mind, I do see the value in using words or labels to find community, especially in times like these. I think you seem open to at least seeing where my unorthodox views come from.
Oh I totally get where you are coming from, I could have written a good deal of that myself.
I’d offer you a hug if I could.
I completely agree that labels, words for boxes we put people in… should as additive, in a good way, as possible, descriptors, not restrictors.
But I also believe they should be accurate, and thus, we unfortunately still do live in a society, and we thus to at least some extent have to keep playing this word game.
I view a term like Autist simply as a matter of fact classifier, and while I won’t force others to, I more or less use it as a self label, when it is relevant to some discussion.
My approach is ‘take the word back’ so that Autism Speaks and idiots who think the measles vaccine gave their kid Autism aren’t the only morons using such words, proclaiming to represent me… us.
We can speak for ourselves actually, we’re not all a bunch of invalid r-tards, and whether or not we like it, we are an extremely misunderstood and at risk minority group in much of the world… if we let others do all the talking, we shouldn’t be surprised that they continue to get a lot of things very wrong.