People are people

I finally realized people are people. This sounds like a pretty lame and obvious realization, but I feel like it has a lot more depth. I’ll try to explain but I feel like this is better explained in person with my passion and hand movements to accompany.
I’ve been having some encounters with people lately that have involved labels. What I mean by this is people see me interacting with someone and ask me about it later only to tell me about that person’s label, such as ‘so and so is a player’ ‘that person is a flake’ ‘this person is a gossip’ and on and on. In the past, I’ve never paid too much attention to labels, or I did pay attention and either treated the person respectively (I’m sorry) or got to know them better so they could prove their label wrong. Since I’ve been here, I have heard more people be labeled than I would have cared to. And here is what I learned: people talk. People say anything they want based on assumptions and very little evidence. They will be nice to you to your face and say things behind your back based on their perceptions, not truth. I guess people could argue that perceptions are truth, but when you apply this argument to labels I think it doesn’t hold too well. I feel like labels help people categorize others in order to make themselves feel more comfortable, even safer. After all, if you know who you think someone is there is very little risk involved with the person. But I say…we’re all just people. Labels work to certain extent, but not if they’re based on only YOUR perception and not if they are used to prove to yourself you are better than someone else so that you can feel more at ease with the person.
People are people. Everyone is the same to a certain extent. We all feel pain, we have all been hurt, we’re all trying to find something that makes our lives seem worth it, we all want someone to see us (really see us), we laugh, we live, we learn…we all do those things. Being a better person is as simple as realizing that everyone is human. I think we forget that sometimes and look at people as competition, pain, or regret. But people are none of those things, no matter what, people are still people.
I think that life has a tendency to sneak up on you. Maybe not life…maybe that’s not what I mean…maybe I mean I have a tendency to sneak up on myself. I am slowly figuring out what makes me tick, what makes me really happy. It is an interesting discovery and definitely one that is being done step by step, which is not the easiest thing for an impatient person like myself. I’ve always said I feel like I always choose the hardest way to do everything, but I think what I mean is that I always choose the most rewarding and it always ends up being the hardest.