"Don't Put Me in A Box!"

Boxes are something to stand on,

not something to be stuck in.

16 Myers-Briggs Personality Types

12 Western Astrology Signs

12 Chinese Astrology Signs

9 Enneagram Types

5 Love Languages

2-Party Politics

Genders

Sexualities

Cultural Scripts

Job Titles

Labels

"Oh, you're such a Scorpio!"

"You're 100% an Enneagram 7."

These things all function to help us understand the world, not to be bound by it. There is no problem with putting people into boxes. In fact, we can't not do it. It's what our brain does. We put labels on things to necessitate a quick and simple understanding of something so that we can move on to other decisions in our day-to-day life.

These boxes help us to not only understand other people and the world around us, they help us to understand ourselves and the world within us.

The issue arises when we create boxes without flexibility for new information.

For instance, if we kept the boxes we had when we were 5 years-old, our understanding of the world would be severely underdeveloped.

Similarly, trying to avoid and rebel against every box and label is no more useful that hyper-adherence to them. Nor does it serve us to say that we have absolute and non-negotiable understanding of some boxes, but we're willing to completely deconstruct and rebuild others.

Boxes are Something to Stand On

Let's take a moment to appreciate the boxes of:

Thoughts - now we can conceptualize things!

Without concepts, our world becomes one giant, unified

Language - now we can communicate!

Metrics - now we can measure things! our strengths and weaknesses, and our growth!