What jobs do you need to do to be yourself?
15th October 2021
Every label that you identify yourself with carries a set of jobs and rules that you need to perform and adhere to dutifully in order to maintain that particular identity.
Attaching labels to who we are, and we all do this, consciously or unconsciously, keeps us trapped in a rigid set of behaviours and jobs that we need to perform in order to feel validated and good enough.
We all carry labels within our sense of self. It could be we consider ourselves middle class, socialist, vegan, spiritual, a good person or all of those at the same time. We’re an amalgamation of many labels and identities that more likely than not have been given to us as we were growing up by our parents, country we live in, economic status and the wider culture in general. Some we may even hand picked ourselves in our teenage years or later.
Wherever we’ve picked them from, the truth is the labels and identities that we hold so dear to who we are, can be a tiresome ball and chain that we have to adhere to and defend.
Take for example the notion of being middle class, we may like to think because of our background or our family we belong to the middle classes. That labels comes from a lot of rules and regulations we’ll need to follow in order to feel we belong to the club.
We’ll probably feel like we need dress a certain way, behave a certain way, have certain beliefs, it may even define the types of hobbies we feel we can have and the people we can hang out with.
And that’s what I mean when I say that each label we put on ourselves carries a set of jobs which will define our day to day actions and point us in the direction of what we are allow to do and what we’re not allowed to do.
Which identities and labels do you carry with you and what are the jobs that you feel you need to do to upkeep them?