Everyone wants a label. Everyone wants to be able to give/apply a label.

Labels make understanding things so much easier. Using labels, we can categorise, compartmentalise, classify, define.

Definition brings delineation.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.
Malvina Reynolds

Remember this from your childhood? Yeah, me too. Need more drugs I think.

All our lives are spent living in boxes. There is the box that is our bedroom, inside the box that is our house. Those boxes are physical ones, but most of our boxes aren’t. There’s the box that contains our race, our gender status, our age. These are things we cannot change - they are the pre-programmed boxes. But there are others we end up clambering in and out of as we trundle along the track - our profession, our marital status, our parental status, our weight, our appearance, our experience, our intelligence, our qualifications, our geographical location.

We are pigeonholed, work in cubbyholes, hide in foxholes. Why are so many of our boxes called a hole? We all inhabit the boxes and wear the labels, in everything we do and everything we are. Even those who try to be box-less by shunning convention and living homeless still carry a label.

So my label (the short version) of “short, obese, middle aged, divorced, tertiary educated, Caucasian, partially disabled mother of two living in New Zealand” has already spread me across 10 separately labelled boxes and hasn’t even begun to describe the person I am, tell about who I am.

All those little boxes, all of them just the same.

Useless.

There is only One box we really need to be in - the box that says “Human".