I have realized something that has been deeply affecting me for a long time: I don’t like labels—not even good ones. Not because they’re always inaccurate, but because they flatten something complex into something static. They take a moment, a trait, an expression of me, and make it the truth instead of a truth. And I am never just one thing. I am all of it, all the time.
Errors in perception hurt me to my core. Not just misunderstandings, but the way people only ever see fragments of me, never the whole. When they speak to me, they often address only one part—one role, one trait, one diagnosis—while everything else I am feels ignored. And that creates a kind of loss, an isolation that I don’t think people realize they are creating.
And it starts so early.
We label children before they even have the words to push back. We say they’re prone to tantrums, difficult, hard-headed, shy, or smart. We act like these are just observations, but they become definitions. A child hears something enough times, and it turns into something they carry, something they have to prove or resist for the rest of their life. And we do it to each other too. We assign identities—intelligent, lazy, difficult, emotional, talented, reckless—like they are fixed, as if someone is always that and never anything else.
I think about the times I’ve been given labels that didn’t fit—clinical diagnoses that felt like a box rather than a reflection of me. I know labels are often necessary. They give us structure, they help us navigate systems, they make things legible in a world that demands order. In grad school, I saw how diagnosis was used as a tool, not necessarily for deeper understanding, but because it was required—to get paid, to access care, to move forward. I understand the practicality of that, but it has always felt incomplete. I kept wanting to dig deeper, but the system doesn’t allow for that. There’s no time. Just label it and move on.
When I ask, do you see me?, I ask, do you see all of me? I’m not afraid of being seen. I’m afraid of being seen inaccurately. So I hide, because the pain of misperception is so intense.
And yet, as much as I resent being reduced to labels, a part of me does it too. I categorize, I assign meaning, I try to make sense of people in ways that simplify them. Maybe it’s human nature, maybe it’s survival, but I still hate it. Because even when I do it, I know it’s not the whole truth.
Labels don’t just define us—they shape us. Research has shown that the words used to describe someone can impact their self-perception and behavior. The self-fulfilling prophecy, demonstrated in the Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968) Pygmalion Effect study, showed that students randomly labeled as “gifted” performed better simply because their teachers treated them as more capable. The reverse is also true—negative labels reinforce struggles. Steele & Aronson (1995) found that when people are reminded of a stereotype that applies to them, like the idea that girls are bad at math, their performance actually declines. Labels don’t just describe—they constrain.
Psychiatric labeling has similar consequences. Horwitz & Wakefield (2007) discussed how diagnoses provide relief but also risk reducing a person’s identity to their condition, limiting how they see themselves. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggests that the language we use shapes how we perceive reality. Calling someone shy instead of thoughtful or stubborn instead of determined influences how they are treated—and how they see themselves. Even neuroscience supports this. The Big Five Personality Model (Costa & McCrae) acknowledges that personality traits are not fixed; they shift over time, meaning labels often fail to capture the full picture of who someone is.
Language is powerful, but it is also limited. Noam Chomsky argues that words don’t have fixed meanings—they change depending on context, yet we use them to define people as if they are permanent. The moment we call someone intelligent or lazy, we act as if that identity is fixed. But it’s not. We don’t exist as static labels; we exist in fluidity, shifting across experiences and roles. Chomsky also critiques how language is used to manufacture consent—to shape public opinion, political narratives, and even personal identity. Similarly, social labels, whether diagnostic categories or childhood personality labels, act as a form of imposed perception, shaping how we are seen and how we see ourselves. If you tell someone they are something long enough, they internalize it. Chomsky emphasizes that language is incomplete—it cannot capture the full depth of thought and reality. When we label someone, we assume that word fully encapsulates them, but it always leaves something out.
The problem isn’t just that I don’t want to be put in a box. It’s that human perception itself feels too limited to ever hold the full truth of anyone. We categorize to make sense of the world, but in doing so, we lose something. We reduce people to pieces of themselves. And I don’t think we talk about that enough. So what if we stopped trying to define people in fixed terms and instead allowed them to exist as they are—fluid, shifting, whole? What if we built systems that made space for that? There must be a better way—one that gives structure without erasing complexity, one that limits suffering instead of creating it.