Labeling Ourselves
A bad experience makes me curious about the self
It seems like everytime I have a shitty day, I have something new to write about. Where at one time it was my unpunctuality that forced me to observe how we observe others, now it’s my procrastinatory actions as a student which have helped nudge me to thinking about the ways we observe and name ourselves.
Now, when I say “observe and name,” I’m talking specifically about labels. Labels are used to name observed things and make them more easily understood at a glance. I’ve talked about labels in terms of how we use them on other people, but I’d like to shift the focus onto how we label and categorize ourselves.
The labels that we define ourselves by have a huge effect on the outcomes of our lives. They can determine the social groups we join, what kinds of food we eat, even our daily stress levels. They also influence how we come to interact with others and how they interact with us. Labels are so powerful that they can even change our identities. In fact, I believe that our identities are (in part*) defined as the collection of labels that we apply to ourselves.
*I only say “in part” as a method of defence. Identity theory is as deep and diverse as the sea, and I do not claim to redefine identity. In saying our identities are collections of labels, I merely want to call to attention the role that labels can have on our views of our selves.
I’m not really talking about anything new. There’s a plethora of research and theory on how we interact with one another and make meaning from those interactions. These are theories which have no doubt affected my opinions and perspectives, but I will be assuming that you know nothing of them. I present myself here as an interpreter of sorts; using my thoughts and experiences to discuss how we interpret ourselves and, possibly, even how we might have gotten to these interpretations in the first place.
So how do we interpret ourselves?
A part of my theory is that we use the processes involved in label making to figure out the stuff that makes us who we are. So, we create labels for ourselves. There’s a lot of similarity in the making of these “internal labels” to how we construct “external labels” for other people. Just like external labels, we self-label based on observations made of ourselves. These observations could be based on behaviors, actions, characteristics, or a bunch of other things which have the ability to manifest into descriptions of who we are.
The strength of the observation in determining how we label ourselves seems to depend on a couple things, like how often we make similar observations; the outlieriness (or uniqueness) of an observation; and how that observation fits into an almost predetermined cubby space or meets an expectation that we have of ourselves. This last point is interesting because it brings with it this notion of fitting in, working well within the social groups that we belong to.
How are our observations of ourselves affected by the groups that we belong to?
As a part of a group, a set of labels are placed on you that identitfy you as a member of that group. I claim that the observations that we choose to construct our personal labels from are actually based off of how well they fit in with those existing labels. How well they fit in among our group identities. That is to say we make observations that reinforce our perceptions of ourselves. We look for the things that say “Yeah, looks like things check out. Go ahead and use that observation to back up your identity.” An observation is only as legitimate as we are willing to let it fit into our social personal narrative. And so, we screen our observations to make sure they fit in by asking:
Does this reflect who I think I am?
Does this reflect how I want others to see me?
Does this reflect how I think others see me?
Does it reflect how others really do see me?
Our answers to these kinds of questions can reveal how strongly we subscribe to the labels that other people place on us.
Being gifted at math.
In middle school and high school I was led to believe that I was gifted at math. There were a couple of reasons for this: teachers had told me that I should take higher level math classes, I recognized the fact that math wasn’t as difficult for me and I did well on tests with minimal preparation beforehand. Within the structure of those school classrooms, I could say that I was good at math and believe it. So I defined myself as being good at math, above the rest of my peers in in terms of mathematical talent and abilities. Back then, this mentality was perfectly suitable because it boosted my self-esteem and made me feel unique since I was good something that others weren’t.
College comes around and I end up being a math major… Go figure. I do well in my math classes for a while, mainly because the concepts are familiar enough that I can grasp onto the basics; I don’t really put too much effort into these classes. I was still holding onto that thought: “I’m good at math.”
Then the hard classes came around; the ones that barely even resembled the classes I took back in high school. By this time, I had developed a habit of not studying (and thus not fully learning) the content of my math classes. I would study just enough to make me believe “I know this for the most part.” Having this recurring thought, in the world of any higher level mathematics course, is a near death wish. “Oh. You know it for the most part? Well great! Here’s a question that only deals with the things that you don’t know about.” Great…
Anyway, I recently had a final exam for a class on Fourier series, and pardon my french, but I totally ate shit. While taking the test, I realized that I had not properly equipped myself to be taking the test. I broke down because I had entirely convinced myself that shallow studying I had done, along with my mathematical wit, would be enough to get me through the exam. Yet it was not. Taking the test shattered some of my last remaining bits of mathematical dignity. I had once again failed** and I felt like I wasn’t able to prevent it from happening.
**I had failed two math classes prior to this one.
Defining myself as “good at math” was being seriously challenged. I had been brought to court and told that all the evidence proved it was false.
No, in fact, I am not good at math.
I was good at math at a certain point in my life when the concepts were easily understood and we spent a lot of time doing in-class work. I was good at math within the structure of pre-college education. I was good at math based on a certain set of circumstances and actions during that time. Despite operating under a totally different set of circumstances in college, I’ve held onto an outdated and inaccurate label used to describe myself. I’ve misrepresented myself to myself; tricked myself into believing this core piece of my identity.
There must be a reason for that. Perhaps I needed to justify being a math major. When I first declared I was intimidated by the choice I had made, and in an effort to cope I held onto this one educational relic that reminded me I was qualified for the major. “I’m good at math and therefore I’m going to be good at being a math major because math is easy for me and I get it.” This label, while describing a positive characteristics, forced on me a totally unreasonable expectation: TO ALWAYS BE GOOD AT MATH. Thus, with every failure, I was failing to meet one of the most important expectations of myself; one of the most important things for me to be good at.
What I’m illustrating here is the tendency to conform to certain expectations of a label once we have chosen to identify with it. So even though we may sense ourselves questioning the validity of that label, we continue to act within its influence because of its impression on our identity. I think this can also relate to the desire to belong to a group. When we find categories that we fit into, we do whatever we can to perpetuate our belonging to those categories, sometimes despite our true feelings to be non-conforming.
I think that all this reveals the fact that there is a relationship between personal labels and the ones given to us, not just by other people, but also by the cultures that we live in. Just as emergent labels are influenced by cultural labels, so too are we influenced by cultural labels (both implicitly and explicitly given to us) when we label ourselves.
A deeper similarity between internal and external labels is the reality that you cannot have one without the other. They rely on each other to exist. This, I think, is proved by the fact that we truly cannot label ourselves, let alone make sense of ourselves, without some sort of pre existing environment attempting to create an identity for us to fit. This relationship is best described using the the ideas of agency and structure to identify the struggles between power relations.
What are agency and structure?
Agency is our capacity to act independently and make choices of our own accord. We might think of it as our freedom to define ourselves apart from others. (If we think of how independence changes from childhood to adulthood, we will have a good picture of how agency affects our ability to define ourselves.)
Structure is the surrounding environment that an individual inhabits. It tries to make choices for us by presenting us with what it deems normal. A structure is most easily visualized as a place with its own culture, rules, history and expectations. Classrooms, coffee shops and houses are all structures.
An important things to note is that agency is built within the structures that we inhabit. It’s not this free floating thing that exists separately from structures. For every social structure, a person will be subject to a different agency, and thus will have more or less control over their own independence depending on things like their role and reputation within a structure.
Here’s an example:
In the classroom, I am a student and the teacher has more agency than I do, which means that he has control over the things I do and learn. It’s this power relation that causes me to identify and label myself as a student. If not for the teacher, the source of authority, I would not label myself as a student.
What this shows is that our level of agency within a structure determines how we view ourselves in a situation and who holds the power in defining us. People with greater agency than us have the ability to shape our identities by defining and labeling us through the things they say and the ways they interact with us
Another example:
A teacher who is encouraging and thoughtful will undoubtedly make a student feel bright and hardworking, whereas a teacher who is belittling and harsh could either make a student doubt themselves or incite a passion in that student to overcome the criticisms of the teacher.
In this example, it’s interesting to note that there is no one way to react to an authority. Whether we reject it or accept it is totally dependent on what our personal narratives dictates. (QUOTE BY CORDER HERE?) It makes me think that agency gives us the ability to guide our identities, and thinking about this struggle between agency and structure provides us with a framework for how we construct labels inwardly and outwardly.
Internal and external labels: a power struggle.
There is an inherent power struggle between ourselves and the structure. When we say that culture tries to define us and force us into a box, we are naming the struggle between our own agency and the structures we are a part of. The structure thunders down on us in an attempt to define and label us according to its values, desires, and inherent needs. The degree to which we are able to define ourselves uniquely is determined by how much agency we have amidst the structure of our environment.
“We are always inventing the narratives that are our lives” battling the structure’s need for conformity as we attempt to find our own individuality. We are products of our interactions with people and the environment that we live in. We are always in a process of becoming.
Special thanks to Helen Morgan-Parmett, James Fortney, Hannah Carter, Chris Field, and Jeremy Cushman for their conversations and contributions to this piece.
Oh, and thanks too to that shitty math final… Wouldn’t be here without you…
