Labels - Won-a-days! - Apr 2, 2006

Moonbeam said...
My highlight today was hearing a women speak about the labels we put on members of our community. It really struck home with me. Sometimes a label is used to judge another, sometimes a label is simply a way of identifying something about another, but sometimes it is how we know one another.

I often remind myself that knowing one thing about a person does not mean you know the person. Knowing many things about a person does not mean you know everything about that person. We are all unique and when we start putting our preconceived ideas of what a person with that label is like we can suddenly build a whole identity of who they are based on imaginary things.

I used to sit and write at a coffee shop before going to work in the morning. Based on the interactions going on in that coffee shop I would write character profiles. It is amazing based on 5 minutes of listening for 5 days, quickly I could build a very real profile. So imagine the person you interact with every day, who you think you know so much about. How much of what you know do you really know? How much of what you know is based on the character profile created by your experiences not theirs?

To me the danger of labels lies in the closing of the door to open communication. You no longer stop to ask about that person's gifts or uniqueness, why would you? In your mind they are already complete.

Suddenly your reality is affecting the free expression of theirs.