I Am Not Your Label

Notes on taxonomy, the violence of classification, and who we see in the mirror

The label is never innocent.

The Form

There’s a form. There’s always a form.

This one is at a doctor’s office, the paper version they still use because the electronic system is down. The receptionist slides it across the counter with a pen. Standard questions: name, date of birth, insurance. Then the boxes. Check one. Check all that apply.

Race. Ethnicity. Gender. Marital status. Employment status.

I hold the pen over the checkboxes and feel something I can only describe as a small violence. Not the overt kind. The administrative kind. The kind that happens so routinely we’ve stopped noticing it—the moment when a human being is asked to reduce themselves to a taxonomy. To become legible to the system.

What if I check none? What if I write in the margins: I am not your label?

The receptionist is waiting. Behind me, a woman with a toddler on her hip shifts her weight. The fluorescent lights hum their industrial hum.

I check the boxes. I always check the boxes. We all do.

What Susan Knew

Susan Sontag spent her life refusing to be categorized. When asked about her sexuality, her politics, her religion, she deflected. Not out of shame or evasion, but out of something more principled: the understanding that the label is never innocent. That to accept a category is to accept its constraints, its associations, its entire metaphorical weight.

In Illness as Metaphor, she wrote about what happens when we wrap disease in language. Cancer patients weren’t just sick—they were warriors in a battle, which meant they could lose. Which meant their death was a failure. AIDS wasn’t just a virus—it was a plague, which meant it was a punishment. Tuberculosis was the disease of artists, which meant the pallor and the cough became fashionable, which meant healthy people wanted to look sick.

The metaphor becomes the prison.

What Sontag understood—what she spent her career articulating—is that the language we use to describe something shapes what that something is allowed to be. The label isn’t neutral. It carries history, prejudice, assumption. It does work in the world.

And we are all, always, being labeled.

The Taxonomy of Strangers

I’m at a party. Someone’s birthday, someone’s friend’s birthday, the kind of gathering where you know three people and make small talk with fifteen. A woman I’ve just met asks what I do.

“Documentary filmmaker,” I say.

I watch her file me. I can see the categories slotting into place: creative type, probably liberal, probably doesn’t make much money, probably has opinions about streaming services. She’s not being malicious. She’s doing what we all do—using the available information to construct a manageable version of the stranger in front of her.

“Oh, like documentaries about what?”

If I say AIDS, addiction, homelessness—the subjects I’ve actually spent years on—I watch different labels slot in. Activist. Bleeding heart. Maybe depressing at dinner parties.

If I say nature documentaries—which I’ve never made—I become someone else entirely. Wholesome. Safe. Probably owns hiking boots.

Neither version is me. Both versions are real enough to her.

This is the mechanism: we meet a person and immediately begin the work of making them smaller. Simpler. Categorizable. Not because we’re cruel, but because the alternative—holding the full complexity of another human consciousness—is cognitively impossible. The brain needs shortcuts. Labels are the most efficient shortcut we have.

The problem is that shortcuts have consequences.

The Root

I’ve been trying to understand why we do this. Not the cognitive explanation—the evolutionary advantage of rapid categorization, the pattern-recognition software running beneath our consciousness. I mean the deeper why. The existential need.

Here’s what I’ve come to: we label others to control our own terror.

The uncategorized person is dangerous. Not because they might harm us—though we often believe this—but because they represent possibility. Ambiguity. The uncomfortable truth that identity is not fixed, that a human being is not a thing but a process, that the person across from us contains multitudes we will never fully know.

To label is to contain. To say: you are this, which means you are not that. To draw a border around another person’s being and call it finished.

The alternative—genuine encounter with another consciousness—requires something most of us are too exhausted or too frightened to give. It requires sitting in not-knowing. It requires letting the other person remain a question rather than an answer.

We check the boxes because the blank space is unbearable.

What the Label Does

Last month, I watched a man get escorted off a plane. The flight attendant had decided he was “agitated.” From where I sat, he looked like a person having a bad day—shoulders hunched, jaw tight, the universal posture of someone who’d been running late and sitting in traffic and maybe fighting with someone they loved that morning.

But “agitated” had become his label. And once you’re labeled agitated, everything you do confirms the diagnosis. Protesting the removal? That’s the agitation talking. Asking to speak to a supervisor? Classic escalation behavior. Going quiet and compliant? Clearly suppressing dangerous impulses.

The label becomes unfalsifiable. A closed system.

This is what Sontag saw happening to cancer patients, to AIDS patients—the way the metaphor colonizes the person until the person disappears inside it. You’re not a human being who happens to have cancer; you’re a cancer patient, with all the narrative baggage that entails. The fighter. The victim. The cautionary tale.

It happens everywhere. The welfare recipient who must perform their poverty correctly to be deemed deserving. The immigrant who must be either grateful refugee or dangerous invader—never simply a person who moved. The woman in the boardroom who is either “aggressive” or “not leadership material,” with no language for the ordinary competence in between.

The label doesn’t describe reality. It creates it.

The Global Machinery

Scale this up and you get borders.

Not just physical borders—though those too—but the conceptual borders that divide humanity into us and them. Citizens and aliens. Natives and foreigners. People who belong and people who must prove they deserve to exist here.

The nationalism rising across the globe right now is, at its root, a taxonomy project. A massive, coordinated effort to sort humans into categories and then assign differential worth. You are documented or undocumented. You are from a shithole country or a desirable one. You are an expat (if white, if wealthy) or an immigrant (if brown, if poor).

The same person, moving across the same border, becomes entirely different beings depending on which label applies.

I think about this when I read about deportations. The language is careful: “illegal aliens,” “criminal aliens,” “undocumented individuals.” Never: a father who has lived here twenty years, a grandmother who fled violence, a child who knows no other home. The label does the work of erasure before the plane ever leaves the tarmac.

You cannot deport a human being with a complicated life and people who love them. You can only deport a category.

The Violence of Simplification

Every genocide begins with a taxonomy.

This is not hyperbole. It’s documented history. Before the violence comes the classification: the yellow stars, the identity cards, the census that asks about religion or ethnicity or tribe. The bureaucratic machinery of labeling that makes the unthinkable thinkable.

Rwanda. Germany. Cambodia. Armenia. Bosnia. The pattern repeats: first you name them, then you separate them, then you can do whatever you want to them. Because them is not us. Them is a category.

We like to think we would never. That the ordinary citizens who participated in these horrors were different from us—more hateful, more ignorant, more susceptible to propaganda. But this, too, is a label. A way of cordoning off evil into a category called those people, so we don’t have to examine the taxonomy running in our own minds.

The truth is, we all simplify. We all reduce. The question is whether we notice what we’re doing—and what it costs.

What the Buddhists Knew

There’s a Buddhist concept called prapañca—usually translated as “conceptual proliferation.” It refers to the mind’s tendency to take a simple perception and elaborate it into a story, a judgment, a whole identity. You see a person; your mind generates “young,” “wealthy,” “probably arrogant.” You hear an accent; your mind generates “foreigner,” “outsider,” “other.”

The proliferation happens automatically, below the threshold of awareness. By the time you realize you’ve labeled someone, the label has already done its work.

The Buddhist response isn’t to pretend we can stop this process—the mind will categorize, that’s what minds do. The response is to see the categories for what they are: constructions. Conveniences. Useful fictions that become dangerous when we forget they’re fictional.

The Sanskrit word is śūnyatā: emptiness. Not nihilism—not the claim that nothing exists—but the recognition that nothing exists the way we think it does. The self is empty of fixed essence. The other is empty of fixed essence. The labels we attach to both are empty of the permanent reality we imagine them to have.

This doesn’t make labels disappear. It makes them transparent.

The Internalized Taxonomy

Here’s the part that wakes me at 3 AM: we don’t just label others. We label ourselves. And then we live inside those labels until we forget we put them there.

I am a filmmaker. I am a writer. I am someone who doesn’t do well at parties. I am someone who needs solitude. I am someone who gets angry too easily, who cares too much, who will never be good at small talk or money or staying in touch.

Some of these labels describe patterns. Some describe habits. Some describe the person I was at twenty-three and haven’t bothered to update. All of them function as prisons—comfortable prisons, maybe, familiar prisons, but prisons nonetheless.

The self-labels are the hardest to see because they feel like truth. They feel like just the way I am. They feel like identity rather than construction.

But identity is construction. Every “I am” is a choice to freeze a process into a thing, to stop the river and call it a rock.

The Cost

What does it cost us, this constant taxonomy?

I think it costs us the world. Not metaphorically—literally. Every label we accept is a door we close. Every category we internalize is a possibility we foreclose. The child who is told she’s “not a math person” stops trying at math. The boy who learns he’s “too sensitive” armors himself against feeling. The immigrant who absorbs the label “illegal” carries the weight of illegitimacy in his body, in his posture, in his willingness to take up space.

And it costs us each other. The moment I reduce you to a label—liberal, conservative, boomer, millennial, whatever category lets me stop seeing you—I lose access to who you actually are. I lose the chance to be surprised. I lose the encounter that might have changed both of us.

The taxonomy gives us the illusion of understanding while guaranteeing we never achieve it.

Who Is in the Mirror

I stand in front of the bathroom mirror most mornings and barely look. Quick check: face washed, hair acceptable, nothing alarming. Then on to the day.

But sometimes—usually when I’m running late, when I don’t have time for this—I stop. And I try to see the person looking back at me without the labels. Without filmmaker or woman or middle-aged or someone who should exercise more. Without the biography I’ve assembled, the narrative I’ve constructed, the identity I’ve been building since I was old enough to have one.

It’s harder than it sounds. The labels rush in to fill the void. The mind doesn’t like emptiness; it will populate the silence with categories rather than sit with the question.

But sometimes, for a second, I catch a glimpse. Something before the names. Something that isn’t a thing at all but a process, a becoming, an open question that will never be answered because answering would close it down.

That glimpse—that moment of seeing without sorting—is the closest I come to freedom.

The Practice

I don’t have a program for dismantling the taxonomy. No seven steps to stop labeling. The machinery is too deep, too automatic, too woven into how human cognition works.

What I have is a practice. Which is just a fancy word for something you do repeatedly, knowing you’ll fail, knowing the failure is part of it.

The practice is noticing. Catching the label as it forms. Watching the mind reach for the category and asking: what would happen if I didn’t grasp it? What would it be like to stay in the not-knowing a little longer?

The practice is remembering that every person I meet is larger than my perception of them. That my neighbor with the flag is not his flag. That the woman at the party is not her job title. That the man escorted off the plane had a morning, has a family, contains a universe of experience I will never access.

The practice is holding my own labels lightly. Remembering that I constructed them, that I can reconstruct them, that the person in the mirror is not fixed but flowing, not a noun but a verb.

It doesn’t work most of the time. The categories are too fast, too automatic, too necessary for navigating a complex world. But sometimes—in the pause before judgment, in the moment of genuine curiosity about another person, in the rare encounter that breaks through the machinery—something shifts.

And in that shift, just briefly, we are not our labels.

We are not anyone’s labels.

We are something else entirely.

Monday Morning

I’m back at the doctor’s office. Different visit, same form.

This time I write in the margin, next to the boxes: These are approximations.

The receptionist looks at me, looks at the form, looks back at me. For a moment I think she’s going to ask me to fill it out properly.

Instead she smiles. “Yeah,” she says. “They always are.”

She files it anyway. The system absorbs my small rebellion without breaking. The machinery continues.

But something happened in that exchange. A recognition. Two people acknowledging, just for a second, that the categories we use to sort each other are not the truth of who we are. That we are all, always, more than the forms can hold.

I check the boxes and I also know: these are approximations.

I am not my labels.

Neither are you.

Neither is anyone.

The mirror reflects a face that has been called a hundred different things. Daughter, sister, woman, filmmaker, difficult, passionate, too much, not enough. The labels pile up like sediment, layer after layer, until you forget there was ever rock beneath.

But there is. There always is.

Beneath the labels: breath. Heartbeat. The next thing that needs doing.

And maybe that’s enough.

---

Image ©2025 Gael MacLean