Label Slave

There is no better morning call than realizing your ex's relationship status secretly changed to "In a relationship" in facebook. In this very city, who isn’t really a label slave, no matter you are a slave for the big labels or a slave being labelled? With the help of Facebook, we can literally put a tag on your “friends” and on yourself. Yesterday morning I was just being labelled to be “professional connection” by a “friend” whom I met once in a random party. And we all know when’s the time you will have the most likes – from “single” to “in a relationship”, from “in a relationship” to “is engaged to”, or from “single” to “is married to”. To be honest, in these recent months, those relationship status bombs are as intense as in war field. I secretly thought, “Are people really “liking” it when they click the likes there? Or it’s more like thanks-for-labelling-yourself-out-of-the-market-and-I-know-now likes?” I looked at my luggage all covered by bumper stickers. I thought, “Are those labels so important for us that we need to tell everyone who we are like putting a bumper sticker on our forehead?”

Last night, I met my college friend whom I knew for years and have been putting an invisible sticker of “nice and traditional and conservative type” on his forehead. It happens when we label our friends as a conservative while putting yourself into the fun and crazy category who is looking for adventurous love, it turns out they are the ones having wild sex all over the place and you’re the one buying the true love story ad of Tiffany’s. Now what could possibly the bumper sticker my friends are putting on my forehead? Will this be “fun happy bird” or “uneasy arrogant bitch” or “desperate sad woman”? And how can we know our labels and does it really matter?

I saw a quote the other day. It says, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” I guess you can never manage to get the same bumper stickers people putting on you. But you can always look at the mirror and define the labels you want yourself to be.

And now in my head, I only have one bumper sticker: