The Elusive and Dynamic Struggle for Identity

The Nature of Updating Identity and its Related Resistance to Change (Vol. 6; Issue 6)

The fictional narratives we use to describe ourselves, tricky from the get-go, require constant editing. The process resembles an operating system upgrade. We crave stability, but our lives are constantly unstable. Our self-images ideally evolve as we age, relocate, develop health problems, gain or lose weight, become fit, begin painting, or learn ballroom dancing. And yet, altering how we view ourselves is more difficult than it seems.

The problem with updating identities begins with the tenuous meaning of words like “self” or "I.” Buddhists believe the self is a delusion they call anātman (in Sanskrit). We experience ever-changing thoughts, feelings, and physical processes. Such dynamism makes the creation of a single, enduring “self” elusive. Ergo, we walk around with self-images that are mere ever-changing fictions.

In describing calamities like World War I and the 1918 flu epidemic, W.B. Yeats captures identity’s elusiveness in the third line of his poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. (p. 156)

The center of our self-narratives cannot hold, cannot be stable, because at their core, no center exists. Intensive observation of one’s self-concept, through meditation, depth psychotherapy, or psychedelics, reveals the lack of a center. If it were possible to completely live in the moment, one would encounter the no-self Buddhists call anatta.

Viewed from a Western perspective, we consistently strive to create nouns to describe ourselves when we are, in fact, verbs. In confirmation, the existentialist author Albert Camus (1956/1991) writes:

There is not one human being who, above a certain elementary level of consciousness, does not exhaust himself in trying to form formulas or attitudes that will give his existence the unity it lacks. (p. 262)

We risk exhaustion because no algorithm, blueprint, description, equation, or rubric can fully contain our identities. As if this weren’t difficult enough, it is difficult to keep our self-narratives up to date.

Academic psychologists and psychoanalysts agree that “mental health” or maturity includes consistency in self-description. Much of the terror that psychotics experience results from their lack of a stable identity. Those of us “normative” people, who enjoy (allegedly) stable self-descriptions, typically present them in superficial ways. At a party for their child’s class, someone might share phrases like:

I am a father, husband, and physician.

Or:

I’m a woman employed as a theoretical physicist who plays basketball on the JPL intramural team.

These trivial statements obviously reveal only the outer layers of self-images. Goffman (1959) believes we behave like actors in our social lives, managing impressions through “front stage” behavior that differ from “backstage preparations.” We hold the deeper features of our self-images in reserve. Interpersonal intimacy involves, at least in part, sharing ever-deeper layers of our self-images.