Toż(to)samo(tno)ść: Identity/ Loneliness

How lonely are we without knowing our identity? How alone are we in the process of searching for it? How lonesome are we going to be once we find it?

We submit ourselves to speculation regarding our own person and its relation with the outside world and other people. This is the consequence of attempts at knowing oneself in a state of upset, studying one’s attitude to oneself and to the surrounding. We look at the process of searching for a point of attachment in the environment, for acceptance. We experience the loneliness that accompanies the search and stays with us after obtaining our identity.

Isn’t it paradoxical that having defined our identity, the process partly undertaken in order to find a sense of belonging, we are prone to loneliness? Loneliness that results from the divisions emerging from belonging, from wishing to fit into a community or a group?

Identity is sensing oneself, understanding oneself within the social fabric and within oneself, finding balance between one’s image of oneself and the way others see us.