Identity (cont.)

"The only identity we have is “I” or “me”; all other labels are externally imposed." - Where There's a Will There's a Way by Laurie Maguire

The quote is taken from a book subtitled "or All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Shakespeare"

"We are different people at different times in our lives. We are encouraged to believe that life is about destinations; in fact, it is about definitions, about who we are at different times. This is
true from a very young age: a new baby turns an only child into a big brother or sister, a younger child into a middle child. As relative positions change, as hierarchical positions change, so do we."

"Feeling unloved is as damaging as being unloved."

"But as John-Roger and Peter McWilliams point out in Life 101, there comes a point when we have to acknowledge that we are adults, in control of our own lives. “Your childhood is over. You are in charge of your life now. You can’t blame the past, or anyone in the past, for what you do today. Even if you can formulate a convincing argument, it does you no good at all. It’s past.” They offer the useful example of glass and gravity; we break a glass but we don’t blame gravity, although without gravity the glass would not have fallen. “Your childhood is like gravity. It was what it was. Your life today is the glass. Handle it with care. If it breaks, it’s nobody’s fault. Clean up the mess and get another glass from the cupboard.”"

"John-Roger and Peter McWilliams add: “You don’t have to like your parents. But it can help heal you if you learn to love them.”"

"Sometimes the categories of friends and family overlap. Sometimes they are related by contrast. Hugh Kingsmill viewed the first category as compensation for the second: “Friends are God’s apology for relations.” The seventeenth-century writer and physician Sir Thomas Browne anticipated this sentiment when he confessed in Religio Medici that he felt more allegiance to his friends than to his family: “I hope I do not break the fifth commandment [honor thy father and thy mother] if I conceive I may love my friend before the nearest of my blood.”"

"Ideologically, of course, this is an unviable situation: friendship is offered, not earned; it is involuntary, not subscribed. When two people are friends, they simply cannot help it. This is
the situation described by the Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne, in his essay “On Friendship” when he describes his feelings for his friend La Boétie:
'If I were pressed to say why I love him, I feel that my only reply
could be: “Because it was he, because it was I.” There is,
beyond all my reasoning, and beyond all that I can specifically
say, some inexplicable power of destiny that brought about
our union.'
This is the language we associate today with romantic love: an external power, an unexplained attraction, feelings that cannot be expressed except by acknowledging that two individuals are one: “it was he, . . . it was I.”"