Overcoming my bad habit of slotting people into boxes

Two years away from Singapore, I am trying to accept people as they are, and not categorise them by work or race.

- Chua Mui Hoong

In my two years living out of Singapore, I have come to view my Singapore self and Singapore life with fresh eyes. When I feel disoriented in social interactions here in Perth where I now live, I pause and ponder what assumptions are being challenged, and what I am being invited to see anew.

The learning is constant and sometimes confronting.

One area I'm being challenged to rethink is my tendency to put things and people into boxes.

I think it comes from growing up in Singapore where we literally learn to tick the boxes as we grow up. We tick off categories for race (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others). Sex (male, female). We check off educational status (secondary, post-secondary, tertiary, postgraduate).

If we apply for financial assistance or a credit card or just fill in a customer survey, we are asked to tick against our income group.

I organise my life around boxes, or categories. There is work, and there is family, and personal life, and I often don't like the categories to mix.

Sadly, I also have a distressing tendency to put people into boxes. Close friends, work friends, work associates who are friendly but not quite friends.

When I meet someone new, I may also mentally slot him into categories by the work he does, where he lives, the school he went to or the way he speaks and constructs a little story about himself.

For example, I may meet a property agent who dresses sharply and speaks Singlish and think energetic agent, keen to succeed. The scrappy working-class girl in me may reply in Singlish with some Hokkien phrases and choose to give him my business, to support his upwardly mobile journey. Or the prissy English literature graduate in me might rise to scoff at his poor command of the language and choose to give my listing to the gently-spoken, middle-aged female agent instead.