Labels

Labels. What are labels? Labels to you and me can look like little pieces of card or plastic that are stuck onto bits of clothing from H&M or Superdry (Yep, that's right, I'm a Goth that shops at Superdry ;) ) . But I'm talking metaphorically. About 60% of you will groan and go, "Oh great , metaphors, the one thing that I had to slave over in English class". For the other 40% , I'm not too sure what the reaction would be. But let's get down to business.

The labels I'm talking about are the ones which seem to define our personality, but that's not always the case. When I say labels , I would take a look at a teenager, for instance. When people think of teenagers, they think usually about five things:

 
 
 
 

-Messy Rooms
-Raging Hormones
-Greasy Hair
-Grunting
-"Am I Bothered?"




This is never the case. Well, maybe some of the time. Most of the time. Okay, 99% of the time. But still, the point stands. These are all labels on teenagers. What about a label on a teacher? What would that say? Maybe something like this:

-Thinks they know everything
-PERFECT clothing
-Cardigans
-Immaculate Hair
-"No chewing gum!"

But that's not the case either. I'm home-schooled, and even though she can drive me mad , I wouldn't have anyone else but my mum teach me, as she is never like this and used to be a secondary school teacher.

Some labels are true, and some aren't. My labels are:

-Whovian
-Stroppy Teenager
-Semi-Goth
-Singer
-Filmmaker
-Actor
- Nerd
-Individual

Yep. A lot of labels, I know. But some of those are totally true. We have labels as soon as we are born many of which are entirely true: Girl, Boy, Baby, Brother, Sister, Son ,Daughter, Love-bringer, Laugher, Biter, Smiler (No, not the one from Doctor Who), etc. etc.. 

But many aren't true. When you look at a person dressed like I was yesterday (when I woke up and decided "I'll be a Goth today." I'll write a blog post about that soon) you might get a certain reaction.  You might get a lot of questions like :

-Do you worship Satan?
-Why do you wear dog collars?
-What's with the spikes? They look dangerous! If you shake someone's hand they'll never get it back!

They're all random questions, but they can also take the form of labels. They can be seen as 'Yob, chav, Satanist, graveyard walker, show off, spiked weirdo or scary '. I see these as untrue labels. I just don't believe in them. They're not right, they make you feel bad, and they're just altogether rubbish, because I am not a Satanist, I am, in fact, a Christian! I'm not a yob, I've actually got good manners. I'm not scary, I'm actually really friendly and a bit of a softie. And yeah, a complete show off.

So here are two of my golden rules:

Never automatically believe a label, it might not be true.

Never judge someone from their label, you can't see what's inside.

So I will finish with a question for you. What's your label? What's your True Label?