Beyond the Available Boxes: the Labels and Associations We Attach

I’ve lived in enough places to know that there are people scattered across the country who know entirely different versions of me.

The people who knew me in North Carolina knew someone different from the people who met me in Arkansas. The people who knew me in New York knew someone different from the people I became after moving back to Texas. The people who met me after escaping my abusive marriage knew a version of me defined largely by grief, anxiety, and survival.

If any of those people ran into me today, they’d probably see the person they remember.

The problem is that person no longer exists.

That isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s simply how memory works. We preserve people in time. We turn them into stories, snapshots, and categories. We remember who someone was when they crossed our path, even as their life continues without us. The strange thing is that we do this with everyone. And increasingly, we do it with ourselves.

Human beings seem to have an endless appetite for categories. We sort people into political affiliations, generations, professions, religions, personality types, identities, and demographics. Every category reveals something useful. Every category also conceals something important. The problem begins when the category becomes more important than the person.

Lately, I’ve been seeing more articles and social media posts about men who say they “don’t do politics.” To clarify: I’m not referring to posts and articles from these disengaged men; I’m referring to posts and articles about them. The descriptions are usually similar: they’re frustrated, disillusioned, cynical, tired, they’ve lost faith in institutions, don’t want to participate in the division, etc.; essentially, they’ve “checked out.” They’ve withdrawn from civic life and retreated into private life, or so they—or those writing about them—say.

Each time I read one of those descriptions, I recognize a small piece of myself. And each time I finish reading, I feel the same sense of distance. But not because the observations are entirely wrong.

Because the category isn’t large enough.

Once you’ve placed someone inside a box, curiosity tends to disappear. You assume you understand their motivations. You assume you understand their worldview. You assume you know what they believe. It’s easier to identify someone than it is to understand them.

The more I’ve examined my own life, the more difficult categories have become.

Take politics.

If I talk about abortion, some people assume they know exactly where I stand the moment I say I believe a developing pregnancy is becoming a human life. The category appears almost immediately.

Then I continue talking.

I acknowledge that I’m a man and that there are realities of pregnancy I can never fully understand because I will never live them myself. Because of those limits, I believe women should ultimately make those decisions for themselves.

Suddenly the category starts to wobble.

The same thing happens with transgender issues.

I can believe that adults should have the freedom to make decisions about their own lives. I can also believe that adolescence is one of the most confusing and unstable periods of identity formation a person experiences and that caution matters when permanent decisions are involved.

Again, the category begins to fail.

What fascinates me about these examples isn’t the positions themselves. It’s how quickly people start looking for a box to put them in. They’re trying to determine which side I’m on. I’ve become increasingly interested in a different question:

Why are we so uncomfortable with complexity?

Over the last several years, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring parts of myself I used to avoid. Through meditation, introspection, and an uncomfortable amount of honesty, I’ve learned that many things I believed about myself weren’t as stable as I thought. Anger had roots I didn’t understand. Anxiety had stories attached to it. Certain fears weren’t responses to the present at all, but echoes of experiences I hadn’t fully processed.

What surprised me most was how complicated everything became once I started paying attention. The deeper I looked, the less certainty I found. The less certainty I found, the more compassion I developed for other people. Because if I was more complicated than I realized, maybe they were too.

If my behavior was shaped by histories, experiences, fears, and injuries that weren’t visible from the outside, maybe theirs was as well. The same realization changed the way I think about identity.

Most categories operate as if people are fixed. As if a political affiliation, a religious belief, a personality type, or a demographic label can tell us who someone is. But human beings aren’t static. We’re fluid. We’re constantly absorbing new experiences, revising old assumptions, healing old wounds, and becoming new versions of ourselves.

Growth doesn’t fit neatly inside categories. Neither does healing. Neither does self-awareness. The older I get, the less interested I become in identifying people and the more interested I become in understanding them. Including myself.

Life has changed me too many times to believe that anyone can be accurately summarized by a label, an affiliation, a demographic, or a single season of their life. I’ve been too many different people. I’ve carried too many different beliefs. I’ve survived things that reshaped my understanding of the world and experienced moments that expanded it.

And I’m still changing.

Maybe that’s the real problem with categories: they freeze people in place while life keeps moving. They preserve a version long after the person has evolved beyond it. They allow us to stop looking, stop listening, and stop remaining curious. The category becomes a substitute for understanding.

And understanding is what disappears.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that people are always larger than the boxes we build for them. Including ourselves. And maybe growth begins the moment we stop mistaking a category for a person.