How many identities can a person have? Is identity constant and created during our first years in a certain family and culture? Or is it something flexible that shapes up in the process of personal development we all undergo? How does language influence our identity and can we have alternative identities for each language we speak? And if the second is true, are we just dolls playing theatre in a "globalised world" - play?
I don't have the answers to these questions and I wonder if the psychological literature I am about to read during the next couple of years is going to help me out of my quandaries. What I know for sure is that this is an issue for many people living far from the countries they have been born and raised in. When the concept of home gets blurry and you start calling "home" whichever place you have been spending more than three weeks at, can you be considered rootless or just called world citizen ? And what about this concept I have just learned existed - "perpetual traveller" ? And how does all that influence our identity, our self-perception and social network? What can we who "suffer" from the "multiple identities"- disease can do to get the best from what we have without mourning what we've missed?
... I just leave this blog post open without giving any answers. Wise people say that giving the right answer is not smart, it is knowing the right question that is smart. Without any ambitions to be smarter than I am I give the word to you in the hope of getting some answers.
Public domain photo by Bobtalbot61, Creative Commons License
1 comments:
Wow... though questions at the end of the year. I think definitely that identities are changeing continously, but at the same time it is not up to us to change them into what we want. Maybe identity is what comes form the meeting of our individuality with the world?
Maybe cosmopolitanism and feeling rootless, are two sides if the same coin... and something we have to deal with in a globalised world? I don't know either...
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