topics: [[identity]],[[psychology]]
[!trailhead]- trailhead → last updated 2026-07-27 | pruning needed
- difficulty: đź”´ hard difficulty; this trail is messy and cluttered.
- elevation change: ⬆️ significant change; this trail veers into complex topics which may require context from outside sources or other trails of thought.
- summary: how our sense of self is constructed, oriented in time, and performed to others.
^a525ab
One way to approach identity is as our self-definition: the constraints we use to corral our sense-of-self into something we can almost articulate. Some elements of our self-definition are explicable – goals, values, preferences – while others are more nebulous, making up the essence of ourselves. It’s unclear whether identity is created or discovered – whether parts of us are intrinsic or not – but the self-definition framing allows room for both.
A strong sense of identity – a reliable understanding of the self – requires a well-developed self-definition; that is, well-researched, contemplated, and challenged.
We learn who we are the same way we learn who anyone else is: asking questions with genuine curiosity about the answers, and gradually building contextual understanding. Likewise, we need to interact with ourselves over time to understand the experiences of our past, which of those stories are still impacting our present, and which choices will be available or desirable to us in our future.
You might already have infrastructure in place to communicate with your past self, like sticky notes, journals, reminders. What are these things if not letters from your past?
If you do any kind of planning, daydreaming, manifesting, hoping, wishing, or wanting, these too can be seen as conversations with your future self.
Maybe communication with the present self is just thinking; perhaps it requires a more mindful approach.
This dialoguing-with-the-self helps us maintain the scaffolding of our identities with a sense of continuity, creating a thru-line tethering you to the broader context of your story, even as individual elements of yourself change.
See 2025-01-19 knowing yourself through time.
Continuity requires integration of selves, experiences, and stories into our self-definition. In other words, your sense of identity will be incomplete if you reject, deny, or ignore parts of you or your story. (See {1.3c2} shadow work.)
Klein, Naomi - 2023 - Doppelganger is an excellent, in-depth exploration of this concept. She defines shock as “a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not have an adequate explanation”; it is the “gap” between the way we understand the world and an experience that is drastically opposed to that understanding.
Shocks, traumas, and other events that shift the foundations of our worldview disrupt our sense of continuity because what we believe to be true no longer matches what we know to be true.
I see this break in equilibrium as the cornerstone of identity crises, while stability – one’s ability to stay tethered to time and space – comes from successful integration that “fills” the “meaning vacuum”.
Social context shapes how we perform identity, in the sense that we perform differently in social spaces and in the sense the context of all of our lives is cumulative and intertwining.
Performance is a partitioning (see below).
Being “AFK”, we have the option of being – or trying to embody – our full self. We are our full selves by default. But online, we are required to write ourselves into being; there is no self in the digital space without interacting there. This can be troublesome because social context is limited and less developed online.
The fragmentation of our identities is not unique to social media or digital landscapes; we are always partitioning ourselves into multiple parts. This is normal, with different “parts” of ourselves only being visible in certain contexts.
Curating elements of yourself necessarily creates a shadow: an other self made up of parts rejected from the performing self; we project this shadow onto others.
This partitioning, and resulting identity crisis, is not unique to individuals; we may also experience collective shocks, traumas, and partitions that require us to un-self collectively…