the woman in me.

if only life were black and white.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about labels and their importance (or lack thereof). I know that there have been many times in the past where labels have frustrated me, even infuriated me, to the point where I have thrown up my hands and screamed to the gods, "NEVER MORE!!"

Let me give you an example:

In high school, I drank. I abused substances that 'altered my state of mind'. I even drank coffee because that any mind-altering substances that I put in my body would increase my ability to cope in actual situations, or so I thought at the time. I wish I were one of these people who could say “I got high on life”. At the time, the emo scene was in full force. Being in that crowd, generally, I became frequently exposed to the different mindsets of this social group. And I became introduced to the so-called "straight-edgers".

NOTHING INFURIATED ME MORE THAN STRAIGHT-EDGERS.

What got me so angry was not the fact that they abstained from so many things - I had secretly wanted the same lifestyle as they. It was the fact that they needed to give it a NAME. As if their personal justification for their lifestyle was not enough, they needed to make it COOL, make it a SOCIAL MOVEMENT. Or, even worse, they only did the same things that the others did because it WAS a movement. I truly believed (and still do today) that if they believed enough in what they were doing, they didn't need to give it a name. They could just do it, and live a good life without having to explain and validate themselves and their choices to others.

As a more well-not-so-recent example, I was speaking with my friend Kate at a dinner a year ago. Kate was raised in a family of vegetarians, and usually doesn't eat meat. But sometimes she does. She is not a vegetarian because of animal rights; she's a vegetarian to promote economic sustainability (which I would like to learn more about; I'd never heard about this before, having never taken Global Studies). Anyhow, Kate was saying that she doesn't think it's that bad to have meat every once in a while, but that a lot of people wouldn't understand that. Because of this lack of understanding, she usually doesn't mention this aspect of her vegetarianism to people she first meets.

This made me wonder: do people actually adjust their lifestyles so that the way they live fit into a label? If I were to define Kate's diet, I would label her as a "usual-vegetarian". But this makes her come off as wishy-washy.

But THAT'S THE POINT. Life IS wishy-washy. It's not black-and-white, but people would like it to be. Do we live our lives from day to day, constantly trying to adhere to black or white, all the while wishing there were a happy medium?

If a gay man has sex with a woman, does that make him a traitor? Or was he merely getting the chance to enjoy one of life's many wonderful experiences? If a liberal is practically a cookie-cutter leftie, but happens to support capital punishment, does that make her a BAD liberal, or is that simply natural variation in the human persona? I could give a million more examples, but I think you get my point. People suppress parts of themselves to fit into society's stereotypes for them.

Now I come to my second point. When I suggested to Kate that she shouldn't change her lifestyle just so it would fit into a label, she made a good point: WE NEED LABELS. We need them to communicate ideas about others and ourselves to other people. Most of us need them to have a sense of definition about our selves.

But is that human nature? Or is that a product of our fast-paced society? In a world where we summarize ourselves into 50 words or less in personal ads, summarize our life experiences into a one-page resume, or summarize a thesis paper that we've been working on for four years into an abstract that is 100 words long, why wouldn't we feel the need to summarize our entire belief systems into one word - "carnivore", "liberal", "heterosexual", "atheist"- even if we don't feel as though that word completely fits? In a world where we rarely converse with somebody for more than 10 minutes at a time, and the extent to which we know most people (in my age bracket) consists of "what's your name?", "where are you from?", and "what's your major?", who has the time to spend discussing exactly who they are? And why does that seem horribly, horribly wrong to me?

Humans are complex creatures. We all, especially at my age, are constantly developing and tweaking our belief systems to fit what is right for us. And that's hard enough; we shouldn't have to tweak further to make that already tweaked version of us fit society's mad-scientist obsession with categorization. I don't want to fit my personality into 50 words or less; I want my self to fill volumes.

I'll leave you with a quote that I believe fits the topic quite well; it's also one of my favourites. It's by Alfred Kinsey, a very, very influential man.

"The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeonholes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects."

Have a good weekend, my loves. Try and get to know someone in this way; I think it will be rewarding. And if you'd ever like to know more about any of the multi-faceted, wishy-washy, shades of grey aspects of my personality, I'd be more than happy to share.

- Tanya

(P.S. I just thought of something else, but I couldn't fit it in anywhere in my blog. I once got yelled at for being a "fence-sitter"! My English teacher in high school, Mr. Menka, taught our philosophy class, and one day we were learning about the different kinds of belief in god [you know the drill: theism, deism, pantheism, atheism, agnosticism, etc.]. And everyone in the class had to pick where they fit on the spectrum. And I was the only person in the class who didn't fit on the spectrum. Nothing on there fit with what I believe! And Mr. Menka said, "you have to pick, Tanya. Nobody values a fence-sitter." And I said, "No, I do not have to pick, I don't FIT in the SPECTRUM!" After that, for like a week, he would ask me whenever he saw me "So have you decided where you fit yet??" To this day I'm still not sure if he was just playing devil's advocate, or if he actually was such a strict "categorizer".)

child of the 90's

cancer

ying/yang