The New Norm

I’m not an overly sane person. Nor am I insane. I think I’m sitting quiet comfortably between the two. Better still I have even set up house. No that sounds lame. I’m just learning that life has too many labels strapped to it. I mean how do we know that the definition of sane is actually the correct definition of the bloody word? Who gets to decide what blue is? Why can’t black be blue? Why are we so insistent and heavily dependent on labels? By slapping the label “Try Hard”, “Wanna Be”, “S***”, B**** and so forth on people do we make ourselves more at ease? Or are we just labelling people into roles and stereotypes to make ourselves feel better about ourselves?

I don’t know about you but I don’t call many people beautiful or fantastic, or successful, unless in turn it makes me sound better. After all having a successful sister sounds hundred times better than say having a dole bludger as a sister. These labels either increase our status and consequently society’s opinion of us or they decrease it.

It’s another form of power playing. Another way to make us seem more advanced, more prefect or damn right better than the average Joe blog. Why do we do this though? Who cares what people think? I say I don’t. And honestly most days I don’t care what people think I am up to or who the hell I am. Then there are those days where my hair just won’t sit right, where I swear I look like I’ve been in a fight, where everything on makes me look ten years old and twenty kilos fatter. Those are the days when I am so overly critical that I can confidently say I believe everyone in the world is thinking the same dark negative thoughts in relation to me. And that’s when I care. I do care when people think I’m a bitch. I don’t care if I say I am. It doesn’t make me feel crash hot to have someone I have never really connected with slap the label on me. It gets my back up and makes me feel downright shitty.

Is this why we have to put people down? You can lie all you like but everyone is snide about some trait someone else has. You may not hear it but I’ll bet every cent I have in my bank account, which consequently is nothing at present, that every person you know, be it friend or foe has at some point in time stuck a label on you. And trust me just because we say you look beautiful so does not mean we like that you do. When you look trashy we feel like a million bucks. We like that people stuck that negative label on you because when we go out looking like a million bucks and people think that, happily or not, we feel more accomplished, more successful. We feel damn right better than you because our label is made out of gold and it trumps your colleague design.

Is this the purpose of labels? It is another way to define people into social classes? Are we just replacing an old norm with a new one? Are labels the new social status rigging?