There have been pleny of times in my life when I decided to actively change my “label”. When I went to college I told myself, “I’m not going to be that girl I was in high school anymore!” When I got out of college I tried to forge a new image for myself in the working world. The thing is… regardless of what changes I made in my life, I always ended up being who I was to begin with. And as it turned out, that was a good thing, not a bad thing.

I’m all for self-improvement, and for taking steps to change your life. The things around you can always get better. But as for those nagging questions you were talking about: “Who am I? What am I? Why? Why! More! More!” I’m not sure the answers change as easily as our labels do.

But no need to identify with them.

Just words, after all.

Oooh, that’s all pretentious and chaos-magicky, innit?

Sorry.

I tend to think that by default we label things. People seem to be, naturally, organizing/pattern-id’ing/label making types.

I think most folks would benefit from moving away from labels, as a general - extremely general - rule. Having done that, like a lot of folks who get into metaphysics do, then you can look back and see where using labels can be advantageous…

My 2 cents and all…

Great post.

i may cut and paste that one in to the alchemy for the braindamaged series at some point.

Yeah, go wild. I thought of that, and realized I was covering some very similar ground to what you’d done already. Good times.

your nervous system is takin in billions of bits of information every second, you’re consciously aware of like sixteen of them. without labels to keep a handle on the rest of that stuff when you can’t focus on them, you’d freak the fuck out.

but yes, good post. i may cut and paste that one in to the alchemy for the braindamaged series at some point.