Boxes are something to stand on,
not something to be stuck in.
16 Myers-Briggs Personality Types
12 Western Astrology Signs
12 Chinese Astrology Signs
9 Enneagram Types
5 Love Languages
2-Party Politics
Genders
Sexualities
Cultural Scripts
Job Titles
Labels
"Oh, you're such a Scorpio!"
"You're 100% an Enneagram 7."
These things all function to help us understand the world, not to be bound by it. There is no problem with putting people into boxes. In fact, we can't not do it. It's what our brain does. We put labels on things to necessitate a quick and simple understanding of something so that we can move on to other decisions in our day-to-day life.
These boxes help us to not only understand other people and the world around us, they help us to understand ourselves and the world within us.
The issue arises when we create boxes without flexibility for new information.
For instance, if we kept the boxes we had when we were 5 years-old, our understanding of the world would be severely underdeveloped.
Similarly, trying to avoid and rebel against every box and label is no more useful that hyper-adherence to them. Nor does it serve us to say that we have absolute and non-negotiable understanding of some boxes, but we're willing to completely deconstruct and rebuild others.
Boxes are Something to Stand On
Let's take a moment to appreciate the boxes of:
Thoughts - now we can conceptualize things!
Without concepts, our world becomes one giant, unified
Language - now we can communicate!
Metrics - now we can measure things! our strengths and weaknesses, and our growth!
You cannot skip the box.
You can only overcome the box.
And most of us Box Rebels are skipping (plot twist, by rejecting boxes you are–surprise–putting yourself in a box).
Overcoming the box has only been accomplished by those few legends in history who were holy avatars and/or attained enlightenment, transcendence, nirvana, etc.
Conversely, letting the box overcome you leads to things like insanity.
Find a happy medium. By embracing the information that boxes and labels can provide, we learn more about ourselves, others, and the world we live in. Being ready to shed a box for a new one empowers us to mature. Building awareness around the fact that to exist is to inherently inhabit a box leads to acceptance of them.
Conclusion:
Congratulations!
You can now celebrate boxes without being trapped by them!
