Labels and Book Covers

The way people label themselves has always fascinated me.

For most of  us it starts at a very young age… even in middle school you have the cool kids, the rich kids, the jocks, the nerds.  Even the loners are a group…they just don’t congregate as such.  

Most of the time we choose these labels for ourselves; sometimes they’re applied to us against our will.  But once there, they’re quite powerful.  A kid may not even now he’s an unpopular nerd until someone tells him he is…and after that, in the normal course of things, he accepts that label and it becomes self-fulfilling.  If they say he’s a nerd, he must be one, right?

Once we grow up (if we ever really do), the labeling continues.  But now it’s more self-directed.  We may identify most strongly with our occupations, if it’s one we like.  This is mostly true about professionals…doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs.  But still, away from work many people go on to develop other identities…maybe connected with hobbies, sports, stuff like that.

Lacking a good strong professional identity, some of us continue to look for a way to label ourselves into adulthood.  We might become environmentalists, hippies, fitness freaks or neo-Nazis; think of ourselves as writers (even if we haven’t even started that novel yet); keep animals and join the horsey set.  Whatever interests us can become a “lifestyle”, some more regimented than others.

Sometimes we choose an identity because it’s “different”; it seems to be something that sets us apart from the rest of society.  This is especially attractive to  people who don’t like what they see around them, or who have trouble fitting into “normal” society, or have had bad experiences early in life and decide to opt out.

The thing is that most people who try to move into a subculture and take on that identity for themselves don’t realize that they’re just substituting one phony shell for another.  Think about the goth kids…was there ever a more uniform group of people who think they’re being “different”?

It’s definitely not exclusively a kid thing, though.

For example, I ride a Harley.  I used to think of myself as a “biker”…until I tried to find out just what that meant.  Obviously, anything can be anything to anybody.  But once I really took a close look at it, I realized that it was just one more set of rules that I was expected to abide by in order to apply that label to myself.  Now, a “biker” in the modern sense is not simply one who rides a motorcycle.  The mom and pop clubs who gather for breakfast and a nice ride on a Sunday morning are not bikers.   Apparently I was expected to automatically dislike cops (admittedly not my favorite group of  people…but I’ve seen “bikers” express an intense hatred for lawmen who’ve never even gotten a traffic ticket).  I was supposed to be a full-on racist (this is unbelievably common), otherwise I’d be labeled as a “(fill-in-the-blank)-lover”.  I was expected to drink myself into a stupor on a regular basis, and to have no compunction whatsoever when it came to boffing another dude’s wife, if the opportunity arose.  Everybody who rode a bike was to be my “bro'”…because it was us against them, right?  But it’s no different than in the larger society; there are some riders who I like, and some who I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with.

On the other hand, the label works backwards, too.  If you have long hair and a beard and wear leathers, when people look at you what they think about is all of those cheesy “Hell on Wheels” movies they saw years ago at the drive-in.  You can’t blame them – they don’t know you.  They haven’t even glanced inside the book of your life, so all they have to go on is the cover.  Of course you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover; but, if you choose to adopt the trappings of a particular group and those trappings are widely recognized, you can’t then complain about the reactions you get.  I’ve often been amused by the unaware whining I’ve heard from people who feel they’ve been mistreated simply because of the way they look.  I mean, if a pack of 20 loud motorcycles pulls into a parking lot, with rough-looking leathered-up riders loudly cussing up a storm jostling their way into your roadside diner, wouldn’t you be just a bit apprehensive?  Might you perhaps not give them the best service so as to not encourage them to come back?  This has to do with the cover, not the book.  The riders might be the salt of the earth…but they choose to project an image that, because of the label they’ve taken on, says otherwise.  So the label we take on…the cover we put on our book…has a lot more to do with how we’re able to interact with the world than any notion of “self expression”.

The list goes on, but that’s just an example from my own life.  The point is that trying to find your identity by taking on a label is never authentic.  I sometimes behooves us to take a step back and see if we’re expressing something that isn’t really us.  It could be that we’re trying to be something we’re not… which is unhelpful at best, and destructive at worst.  The ultimate goal is to express our uniqueness as authentically as possible, because that uniqueness is what give us the power to create new and exciting things.