We love to name things, because a name tells us where the thing belongs: sub-species Brookesia, micra to indicate insular dwarfism. Giving a set of traits a name also helps us figure out how to treat an animal: spiders bite, dogs can be tamed, elephants mourn. It seems odd, however, that we love so dearly to categorize and classify each other, when each of us individually is in such a constant state of flux. How many times throughout your life will you lurk over at WebMD because your kid can’t — won’t! — tie her shoes, or because you have recently started to acquire a big stack of magazines you are almost biologically reluctant to throw away, or because your hormones start to look like Satan’s parabolic graph? It feels safer to know who you are, right up until the point where you start to wonder if you were wrong all along. Maybe humans are unique in their ability to match their interiors to external situations, to change their colors when necessary — you cope with chaos as a child by believing that you’re capable of a kind of superstitious magic, never stepping on cracks, but later shed that because you’ve seen As Good as It Gets; you accumulate too much crap in your living room until you see too many episodes of Hoarders, you think you’re varsity at dieting until you start to fear butter as if it were a wild dog. We forget how fluid the experience of being human can be, and maybe we frighten ourselves away from exploring our dark parts because we don’t want to be defined by our “symptoms” — and, obviously, we never should be. When we recognize our own traits as being somehow dysfunctional, we attempt to correct them.

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Tess Lynch

(via drinkyourjuice)