It seems like one of the mental holes we can fall into, or maybe it’s more like a mental box we can put ourselves in, is to see ourselves as being a certain “type” of person.
I’m a certain kind of character.
And we sort of build this kind of construct of the type of person we are, often even without consciously thinking about it in any clear way, but just in the realm of automatic assumed things, things that we just assumed to be true, that seem to fit.
We can place ourselves inside a box of being a “type”.
Now, we’re all people.
We’re all, you know, we’re some kind of- we’re people.
We can say that we’re this type of being.
We are human beings.
That seems to be a real thing, that you know, clearly we’re not a different type of animal, we’re a human being.
But what does that mean? The specifics of it seem to be a little bit less clear.
If we try to say that we’re a specific type of person, what does it mean to be a type of person? That doesn’t seem to be anything that’s as real as simply being a human being.
In the most general way, we are this kind of being, but the types, it seems to me, are kind of imaginary.
It’s like well, you know, I am a a leader.
I’m an intelligent person.
I am a kind person.
I am a strong person.
I am- or maybe all the opposites.
I am an outcast.
I’m a rebel.
I’m weak.
I’m a loser.
I’m a mean person.
I’m an evil person.
All these kind of labels that we can say for being a type of person.
We can so easily apply these to ourselves and just kind of walk around every day as if this is somehow built in to our nature.
“I’m just this type of person.
That’s just my way.” Whether on the good side or the bad side, a label that kind of builds us up or tears us down, we can just assume that this is reality.
But really, what are these types? This is a construct.
This is imagination.
This is something that we can picture that OK, here’s a certain type of person, and I’m that type of person, but what does it really mean to actually have that type? So imagine letting go of those types.
Imagine just completely forgetting about being any particular type of person and simply being a person with no definition.
What would that be like? What if you were simply a person, and any extra label that you could apply to define what kind of person: “Oh, what kind of person is he?” “What kind of person is she?” It’s just a person.
Just a person.
Just a human being.
What would that be like to have no label whatsoever beyond being a person or being a human? What would it be like if any kind of adjective you could apply, or any other kind of detail about saying the type of person you are, if that could just be completely irrelevant? You could say well, maybe sometimes, I’m a type of- maybe sometimes I’m a person who could be considered to be kind, or mean, or a leader, or a loser, or whatever the label is.
They might sometimes apply to me.
But it’s not like I can ever take any of those labels to actually describe who I am.
Somehow it seems like we can be freed to be more naturally who we are if we can reject all those extra labels that apply to be any kind of type of person.
So what would that actually look like to be just a person?
#justaperson #nolabel #typeofperson