Self-labelling: A Hobby

I watched an episode of The X Factor once (at the time I didn’t generally make a habit of this; since then things have rather taken a turn for the worse), where an auditionee walked into the room, ripped off the sticky label with her audition number on, and irately declared, ‘First of all, let’s sort this out. I am not a number, I am a human being.” 

People often seem to have a problem with labels. In the case of the aggressive X Factor contestant, it irritated her to be an identity-less one of many. That’s understandable, I suppose, though she could have been rather less bad-tempered about it. I found myself in much the same frame of mind during UCAS applications, when I imagined that it must be very easy for universities to reject applicant 105-220-0994, as opposed to an actual person with feelings on the matter.

When the label actually describes an aspect of the person in question, it’s even more of a touchy subject. It’s the reluctance to be defined as one thing, or to be viewed in a certain way. They’re restricting. I call someone wearing a tracksuit a chav and you assume they have a bad attitude, hang around on street corners and play rubbish music at full volume on buses. Whereas I’m sure there are some very nice chavs out there. Probably. So you hear people say things like, ‘I’m not a label, I’m me.”

The problem I have is that as a label, ‘me’ is not a very helpful one. It’s tautological: if I ask, “Who are you?” and you reply, “I am me,” I have gained precisely zero information on you apart from the fact that you’re probably one of those non-conformist types that refuses to be put into a mental box. It’s even less helpful when I ask myself, “Who are you?” and that is the answer I return.

For that reason, I love labels. Only self-applied labels, you understand, or those given to me by friends. For example, I’m happy to be called a nerd by people I like, but back in secondary school, it tended to mean ‘loser’ as opposed to ‘interested in things not generally considered cool’. I suppose the danger is when you only see the labels and not the person they're trying to unravel.

The thing is, ‘I am me’ is for people who understand exactly who they are and feel no need to explain themselves. And, as yours truly is your typical, always-trying–to-find-myself adolescent, in a permanent identity crisis, I’m still tirelessly striving to define what this ‘me’ is. I want to break it into chunks, however artificial they are, and fit myself into little boxes until there’s nothing unfathomable left.

I’m addicted to those psychological personality tests you can take on the internet that will give you a category that you belong to. I can tell you, for instance, that according to the Myers-Briggs Personality Types, out of sixteen personality types I am an INFP – Introversion, iNtuition over sensing when taking in information, Feeling over thinking when making decisions, and Perception over judgment when interacting with the external world. Meaning I prefer small groups of people to large ones, think abstractly as opposed to concretely, value personal considerations more than objective criteria and tend to withhold judgement and delay important decisions. I read the entry for INFPs on Wikipedia (source of all knowledge; don't you dare say it’s unreliable!) and was fascinated by how accurate the description was. It took this weird, complex thing that is myself and put it neatly into a nice, straightforward compartment that seemed to encompass a sizeable proportion of my odd self. Marvellous!

Of course, as a label it's not a perfect or definitive indicator of personality by any means. But it's better than the obscure and perplexing 'me'. And so I shall continue to nurture my little collection of pet labels - one of them is 'hoarder', so it's unsurprising really - and perhaps one day I will feel that I have discovered enough about myself to set them free, and just be me.