Stop Putting People Into Boxes.
Simply put, if you’re tired of people judging and labelling you like you’re some sort of grocery store inventory item, stop doing it to others.
Have you ever had someone who you are not a complete stranger to, but also have never had a proper conversation with, treat you in a way that made you realise that the person has built a whole picture of your personality without ever having talked to you? If I am not the only over-analyser here, then hopefully you can recollect at least one situation where this happened to you. Now, if, by chance, that person happened to have made a completely wrong guess about your personality, I’m sure you would have felt violated and defensive when you got to know what that person assumed about you and had been thinking about you all this while.
That feeling of violation, I imagine, is very similar to being framed for a crime you didn’t commit and not being given the chance to prove your innocence to the people.
When such things happen, can you really blame the other person for having assumed something about you? Oftentimes, we blame ourselves because we must have done or said something that caused the other person to form such an opinion about us, right? While this might be true, I don’t think we should blame ourselves for it, because we cannot help it if something that we said or did was taken out of context or misunderstood : there is no one who has never said or done anything that hasn’t been misunderstood; it just isn’t possible.
But, lovely readers, there is a very simple solution to this problem that will make sure that no one will ever have to feel that feeling of violation and helplessness ever again.
When someone is quick to assume something about you, they’re putting you in a small, small box. And that feeling of helplessness you feel when they do so is the claustrophobia of being trapped in such a small box.
And don’t think that you’re only the victim here, because if you’ve ever been put into a box, chances are that you’ve also put people into boxes many times.
People put people into boxes because categorizing other people’s personalities is easy for the brain to handle. You heard someone talking a lot to their friends one day? Let’s categorize them into our box of loud extroverts. If we haven’t put someone into any boxes, it almost feels like we know nothing about them, or that we know so much that it’s too overwhelming to make any sense of. Imagine if we didn’t put people into boxes : our brains would go crazy trying to make sense of everything we know about a person!
But think about it; is it really right to try to summarize the entire personality of someone into a bunch of boxes? Can your personality be expressed in terms of a bunch of boxes? You’d run out of boxes, because guess what? Personalities can’t be expressed as a bunch of boxes — no matter how many boxes you have.
If you’re sick of people trying to break the infinite, diverse spectrum that is your personality into small pieces of discrete qualities and habits, you need to stop doing it to others first. And that is our solution to this problem. If you want to stop being put into boxes, stop putting people into boxes. Sounds like an easy solution, but here’s the tricky part.
I’m going to be honest and say that after becoming aware of the whole boxes situation, I have tried not to put people in boxes and have been successful in doing so, but I’m not proud to say it because it is a really emotionally draining process. When you stop putting people into boxes, it also means that no matter how many “bad things” someone does to you, you never call them “bad people”, because you are no more allowed to put them into the box of “bad people”. This doesn’t mean that you keep giving people second and third chances, but, unfortunately, it does mean that you can never truly hate anyone anymore, because that means forming a strong opinion about them, and that’s not allowed anymore, sis! As a result, I’ve had to start acting like I hate people who hate me just so that they don’t think it’s okay to walk all over me with their actions again.
Phew. Let’s ignore the fact that I turned this article into a therapy session for myself and get back to the point.
When you stop putting people into boxes, it will become harder for you to form any opinions of people, and from a purely logical point of view, that can be perceived as disadvantageous. But when you stop putting people into boxes, you will be doing a service to yourself because you know that there are dozens of people who you are saving from that feeling of violation that you yourself despise every day. Also, you are technically stripping yourself of the ability to truly hate anyone anymore, and that, to me, is a powerful skill.
Putting people into boxes is lazy, and a very surface-level way of doing things. Simply put, if you’re tired of people judging and labelling you like you’re some sort of grocery store inventory item, stop doing it to others.
