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.

Labeling keeps things in place. Brings a kind of certainty to the unknown, and the human brain, struggles with the unknown.

It needs to know. It needs to name. It needs to make sense of things.
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…

We are storytellers, maybe the only ones among all species.
We suffer more from not knowing  than from knowing .

So we will find a name for whatever it is we need to put in that box. Whether it’s a name for our identity, our emotions or our suffering.

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

But what if I don’t have the words?
What if I don’t know what to call what I feel?
I then pick three or four emotions that I know. And I use them. Over and over again. I start identifying myself with them. They become me. I’ve just entered yet another box.

Sometimes, the box feels safe. There are others inside it. I understand the expectations within that box, the rules.

And slowly I start looking at myself only through the lens of this box.
I stop questionning. I stop looking beyond it.

And when I feel something is changing inside me, I don’t know how to manage that and the rules of the box.

I resist the fear of not belonging.

As much as I resist the fear of not being me.

I forget there are other boxes out there, and there is a life, outside boxes too.

And maybe here is my resistance whenever I’m asked to tick a box.