The Box

I’m filling out an application for funding. The questions are straightforward enough. Maybe too straight forward. They pull me somewhere else. A tendency of mine. I redo the world before answering what would seem rather simple questions.

So here I am.

Why do we need to label so much?

I take my first step into yet another hour of self-examination: I order another coffee.
I can see how it helps. The labeling, that is. Not the coffee. Though the coffee, too.
It keeps things in place. Brings a kind of certainty to the unknown, and we, as humans, struggle with the unknown. We need to know. We need to name. We need to make sense of things. The brain works like that—it gathers past information it remembers, arranges it into something that looks familiar. A best guess. An almost-truth. 

It’s useful.
It’s necessary, even.
But I can see how it can easily go wrong…

I think about how much we need to make sense of things. How it’s as much about the body as it is about the mind.
We are storytellers, maybe the only ones among all species.
We suffer more from not knowing what’s wrong than from knowing what’s wrong.

Once it can be named, has a label, somehow it becomes manageable. We can look for solution to the problem. We can “fix” it. Or try.

This applies to emotions, too.
Dan Siegel calls it “Name it to Tame it.”

But what if I don’t have the words?
What if I don’t know what to call what I feel?
Emotions are names we’ve given to bodily sensations—ones that change from person to person, from moment to moment. 
I never learned what they are. What do they do and why. How to recognize them. I don’t have the vocabulary. So before I can name them, I have to define them for myself.
Like learning a language.

It takes time. In the meantime I over simplify them by using one or two over and over again. I start identifying myself with them. They seem to become part of me cause they keep coming back. They become me.

And maybe here is the restriction of it all.
A label is a box.
A box has walls.
Walls that separate. Walls that keep in. Walls that keep out.

Once something is labeled, it comes with expectations. Rules. A way of seeing. A way of being seen.
We start to look at ourselves only through that lens.
We stop questioning. We stop looking beyond it.

Sometimes, the box feels safe. There are others inside it. The decisions are made for us.
Sometimes, it feels like a trap. We’re filled with hopelessness and helplessness as we feel nothing we do will change our situation. Cause the box makes decision for us.

And then there’s the choice to step outside.

There are others out here, too. But are they really like me?
And if I’m not in this box or that box… then where do I belong?

Or maybe I can build my own box.
A strange one. One that can evolve. One with doors, with windows, with space to breathe.