Unboxing Society

 Unboxing Society

Anyone who has read my books (and if not, why not?) may have noticed I’m not a fan of stereotyping. I am in fact strongly in favour people breaking free of the expectations society places on them on the basis of their birth and upbringing and (within reasonable legal bounds obviously!) being exactly who they are. Some people might even describe my characters as “living their best life” or “being their true selves.”

However – I wouldn’t.

Because, dear reader, I despise those two phrases as they are used in this day and age. To me, they are merely an emphatically stated gateway for stepping straight from one stereotype box and into another. To me they represent not freedom but a whole new set of rules. They represent that society is boxed up.

Allow me to explain.

Society has always come in boxes. Historically, there was the male box and the female box, the rich box and the poor box, different ethnic boxes and cultural boxes and each one came with its own set of rules of dress, behaviour, profession and attitude that had to be obeyed – just like life in the Realm. Everybody had a box and everybody was expected to stay put in it. Those who stepped outside these boxes were considered strange or wicked or dangerous and inevitably set upon, punished or excluded.

And while times have changed, the boxes have not. For while the number of boxes has expanded with previously othered options now available for various sexualities, genders (or non-genders), ways of being and lifestyle choices, the boxed nature of society is unchanged. The major difference is that movement from one box to another is now possible, albeit not always easy. And inevitably, when someone says they are “living their best life” or “being their true self,” what they mean is – I’m moving out of that box and into this box now. And no matter how freeing being out of the old box may feel, the new box still has its own rules of dress and behaviour and a societal expectation around it that one is expected to live up to. At the end of the day, it’s still a box.

I feel very strongly about doing away with boxes. Living up to the expectations of a societal box – any box – can be crushing. People across all types of boxes both traditional and recent find themselves not wanting to wear certain clothes and behave a certain way in case people get the wrong idea about who they are and where they fit in. Others overcompensate by pushing to the extremes of their box to prove their place in it as much to themself as anyone else. None of these people are being their “true selves” as far I can see. They are being the selves that lives in that box and wants to fit in with everyone else there. Belonging means more to them than being themselves.

Rather than making more and more boxes worth of stereotypes for people to fit into and move between, I wish we could just do away with the boxes altogether and just let everyone, genuinely, be themselves. In order to truly find out who you are, one needs to think very much outside the box. Examine honestly what about your current way of being makes you happy and what doesn’t. Find a place where you are comfortably just you and live in it. As long as you being you doesn’t harm anyone else’s way of being them, then that’s the way to be. Find your fit and not society’s expectation of it. Stop worrying about fitting in with what everyone else expects and just be you. Find whoever you is when that box worth of expectation is stripped away.

And then, just maybe, saying you are being your true self and living your best life will mean exactly that.