personal identity

Many of our comfort blankets form part of our personal identity, and this personal identity is one of the most fundamental comfort blankets: the persona. It comes from Greek, I believe, meaning ‘to speak through’, meaning a mask that an actor puts on. And this is what we are all doing with each other: putting on a mask, a persona, and speaking through that. We somehow feel that our authentic self is not good enough, is not right. So we turn to this persona, and feel that other people will value us more as that personal identity. And by holding onto that personal identity, it gives us a feeling of security. It is who one feels oneself to be.

It’s a sort of story made up by oneself: a fictitious character in a novel or a film. It’s fiction, and yet we invest so much in it. By holding onto our personal identity, we have a stability. It gives us the sense of knowing who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how we’re going to behave in different situations. And all of that knowing is comfortable. Life is not so scary if we feel that we can predict how we will respond to different possible events. And by making us less changeable, the personal identity gives our sense of being an individual – a separate autonomous being – it gives that sense a grounding, a reality that it would not otherwise have.

So our identity is a huge part of who we feel ourself to be, ordinarily. And yet, ultimately, this personal identity is limiting us. It is a narrow concept of who we are. And it limits how spontaneous we can be. It holds us. But in holding us, it also holds us back. It stops us from flowering fully, from growing into that which we could be. We cannot fulfil our deepest potential whilst we cling to the personal identity.

So, like all these comfort blankets, the personal identity is not healthy. It is ultimately harmful. It restricts our enjoyment of life. So I invite you to start letting go of your own identity. And this is tremendously difficult, because without that personal identity, who am I? Really to let go of this – this fundamental comfort blanket of the identity – to really let go of it, we have to be very comfortable living in the unknown.