Very often, our identities form from and around limited dimensions drawn from our meaning perspectives and the habits of mind we develop from those perspectives. We might also consider that any identity, no matter how negative or even self-destructive, feels better than no identity at all. Even in the darkness of our identity inflicted night, even my suicide centered identity we find comfort in that our identity persists and feels real.
The nature and question of identity and how it relates to our becoming self and our whole being deserves our profound and repeated attention and interest. Once again, it also does us good to think about the wholeness of our being. The examination of our being into parts does not signify a separation into separate parts in that same way examining and treating an infection of the lung means that the lung exists in an independent life from the body. In fact, many people consider the treatment of one part of the physical body as a separate entity from the rest serves as an error which can produce, and often does produce, very unwanted effects. Reductionism works when we need to examine components of a system to understand that component and that system more fully. It fails when reductionism settles with knowing the parts and ignores returning to the system in its entirety, ignores the whole being. In a search for the becoming self, we really search for the whole becoming being to find a way to allow all the features of the single entity of the whole being to fulfill its own purposes and thereby fulfill the purposes of the whole as well. Indeed, that microcosm of the becoming self, identity, and ego can serve as a reflection of the macrocosm of our whole being in general. Every entity exists in its place for its own reasons, and these entities also serve in a larger structure, thereby creating a dynamic ecology of being and becoming in the microcosm and the macrocosm in balance.
In a world that can appear chaotic and formless, we can feel ourselves threatened by the nothingness of that chaos. When nothing follows some specific form, we, as lovers of form and makers of form, can feel a lack of control which we can feel threatens our essential existence in the world. The becoming self relates to some other standard of being rather than the material, but as whole beings, we need to live in connection and interaction with the material world—dimensions within dimensions. If that world feels chaotic we will seek to find something in our being that makes for another kind of statbility and balance. Our identity means to serve that purpose. Our identity allows us to feel that we "be" in the world. We offer ourselves some stability, something definite and real that we can hold on to, a benchmark for our psychological, intellectual, and emotional existence in the external and material world.
During our early youth, many of us find stability in our homes with our caregivers and other adult authority figures. They seem to show us a world that takes on a form and a stability that we feel we need, and in our finding it from them, we need less from ourselves. As we age, we find that these figures offer us less and less of the quality and quantity of the stability and form we need within ourselves. At that point, we work to build an identity for ourselves. We do so because we feel a desperate need for that identity to operate in the world and accomplish many if not all of the most necessary functions we have as social beings.
In our selves, even if we don't exactly put language to it, we need a sense of being someone recognized, accepted, and valued by others. We want and need a sense of family, friendship, and community, and we want to feel that what we do and what we are shows some quality of meaning and form to a small or large material world. We want unconditional positive regard, and to feel such regard really means something to us. We want to feel that regard directed to our very identifiable "I"dentity.