Labeling, and Why It's Necessary

[Tegwedd ShadowDancer]

The past couple weeks we've been packing, mostly my books.  It's a dual person assembly line.  I take the books from the shelves, and hand them 1 at a time to Stephen, who actually does the packing.  He tapes the box closed, and then I do my thing.  My thing, in this case, is labeling the boxes.  It occurred to me how many people of a certain age resist being "labeled."  They believe that this puts them in a certain box, from which they may never escape.  Well, I have news for these people;  labeling is a necessary process of the human mind.  Human minds function with language, and the first words a toddler learns of hir native language are nouns, or labels.  

Mama and Dada are the labels the young person applies to the 2 most important people in hir young life, concepts that literally mean life to hir.  In some ways, our minds function like file cabinets with millions of files, all with names or LABELS on them, associated with other nouns or LABELS. We connect verbs with these labels too, associated with what these LABELS do or are, states of being.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that encountering someone who says "I don't want to be labeled.  I don't like labels." really raises my hackles up.  What am I supposed to think about this person?  I am NOT going to have a blank file in my mental filing cabinet.  I categorically refuse to.  By even saying that he refuses to be labeled, this person labels himself as a numbskull.

I know what he's trying to resist.  He's trying to resist people making value judgments about him.  But in refusing to be labeled, he labels himself as that dark oil featured in The X-Files that oozed out everywhere.  I make a value judgment about him, one that isn't very favorable, that this person is slippery, probably doesn't have a very large educated vocabulary, and is therefore to be avoided in the future.  Of course, there is the distinct possibility that this person is simply ignorant of who or what he is.  I'm using the masculine pronoun because I've noticed that these non-label people tend to be male.  If I happen to encounter this person at a Pagan event,  one may reasonably assume that this person is at least interested in Paganism, and so may be a Pagan, a Pagan seeker, or a Pagan sympathizer.  Why would such a person resist being labeled?  A person may have multiple labels, based upon the paths he or she has studied, and/or been initiated in.  If this person is not a slippery label-avoider, and worth getting to know better (uh oh, here comes another label, worth getting to know), I can revise my labels as the relationship develops, and perhaps add labels.  But labeling is inevitable, unless, of course, you just want to wear the label A Whole Lot of Nothing in my mind.