The world has always been fond of placing labels on itself. It has trained me to do the same.
To think of myself in terms of boxes based on the things that I do, the things I eat, the religion I follow, the colours I wear and all the other infinite traits that arise because of my existence.
This has been the source of tension within myself for a while because anything I do, the mind tries to classify into one of these boxes. So that it can find itself in relation to the world, to make sense of it.
Why wouldn't it?
The world itself is a web of relation. Nothing can exist without being related to something else and that is the complex beauty of the real. The mind therefore follows what it has seen in nature. To relate and define ruthlessly until there is no room for ambiguity.
I'll give two examples of this behavior now.
When I label myself as a product designer, I self- impose boundaries around what I can do even before the world can. Subconsciously I try to act like a designer and my mind thinks of how a designer should be and will do in a certain situation. I limit myself to what I believe a designer can do and what design is.
If I think of myself as an atheist, my mind fights with itself when it wants to think of the possibility of God. When someone talks about religion and god around me I internally dismiss it as laughable. Sometimes I even go as far as asserting that I am an atheist because that is somehow part of my personality or that being atheist is a sign of being rational and clear thinking.
As you can see the main problem with definitions and labels is not that they define what you do and think. The main problem is that they define what you cannot do and cannot think. Almost like a subconscious blinder that we put on ourselves.