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You are more than your CV and IDs.
You might have thousands of different identities. How do you identify an identity? It’s pretty simple. Everytime you say “I am x.” that is an identity. The verb to be is indeed not one to be thrown around lightly.
To be or not to be
When we say something or someone is some thing or someone, we are creating links in a vast web of interrelated identities. “Lady Gaga is Stefani Germanotta” is a pretty direct identity as it the statement refers to a pop diva persona and her name at birth. “You are beautiful” is also stating an identity of the person. Don’t we sometimes call people by their attributes like “Hey sexy!”?
Name, attributes, occupation, psychological traits or diagnoses… these are all equally part of your identities and there isn’t a hierarchy or categories grouping these identities. It’s no more important whether it’s something only you say, or if everyone says it about you. All identities are equal for the subconscious who doesn’t play favorites and treats all your identities the same.
Imagine yourself in a cloud of words with the identities on your ID and your CV being a few amongst all the others. Maybe you are an imbecile, maybe you are ugly or fat, maybe you are a liar and a cheat. These are all worthy of love! Even the cheat! (Who but a cheat can defeat a cheat when they start cheating against us?)
Identity flux
Identities also change all the time. One day you can be sad, and the next you are happy. People with borderline personality disorder have something very interesting going on with their so called “unstable sense of self”. They probably have an acute intuition of their current identities and sense every change in who they are.
Identities are not meant to be stable. They are meant to fluctuate and shift around to best serve the individual who has them. Self-awareness is all about being aware of the identity flux in our sub/consciousness. We let go of identities when they no longer serve us, and acquire them when novel situations arise calling for new identities.
Beware of those who want you to entrap you in identities that is in your best interest to forgo. These are people who want to enslave you by making you stick with some identities like name at birth, gender identity, credit score, etc. Identities were never meant to be set in stone.
Conclusion
So… who are you? You are the current set of identities of your self. Your self is constantly self-identifying using identities. Thus, to know the self, one must turn to the identities it presently holds. It is through identities that the self let’s us know who or what the self actually is. Identify all of your identities; get to know yourself; and then you can decide to love all of it!