Who am I really?
After a few sentences, her voice on the phone sounds familiar again. We have not spoken to each other for 30 years. "I still have letters from you, from back then," she says, "do you want them?" I never thought about those letters anymore. But now I can see the situation again right in front of me: At that time I was in my mid-20s and was about to finish my studies. I did not know what happened after that. For the first time, regardless of the women's group, WG or political group, I had to decide on my future. Berlin - my girlfriend had moved there - was still a long way off. Far enough to indulge in letters, unrestrained in dreams, goals, hopes. Because at that time we wanted to do one thing above all else: to do everything very differently than all generations before us.
Maybe it's no coincidence that we've just found each other again.
Now that we finally come back to asking ourselves: what - and especially who - has become of it? Have we made the world better, have we become famous, have we found our own happiness? What missed opportunity can we perhaps seize again, which unrealized dream realize? And what do we have to throw overboard for comfort and material goods that have become dear? My girlfriend and I then sent a few e-mails back and forth. Of course we email, and what we write now will not be in any shoe box 30 years later.
"Was not to be expected otherwise, in the conditions ..." she writes to me, after I have told of all the personal and professional twists in my life. And now I find that much more interesting than my old letters: What red thread does she recognize in my life that I perhaps do not even know about?
It's a nice idea that there is something unique
which accompanies us through all stages of life, like our immutable passport features. An identity. And we'll probably look for a lifetime afterwards. It was pretty easy when we were young. We had role models, political goals, a world view - and the security of a group was often almost automatic. If we did not want the life plan that the convention intended for us, we could look for like-minded people in a colorful protest movement. The right wardrobe, the political points of view, the rules of conduct and the accompanying musical program were all ready for that.
If we did not like the K groups, we just went to the Spontis. And the anti-nuclear movement with its happy, combative red suns has absorbed us all. The bots were playing "Get up!" to, with a wonderful Dutch accent. Only sometimes we secretly and quietly asked ourselves: And me? How does that go along with what I personally want from life? Soon after, these questions became very concrete. We had to constantly make decisions that set the course for the future: for or against a job, a city, a man, a child, an apartment.
Most of the time we only asked ourselves at the edges of life: Who am I? Why am I falling in love with this man who does not fit my vision of the future? What do I do if my job is suddenly threatened? Why am I afraid of losing myself when a friend dies of cancer? The one I needed, like the air to breathe, to talk about the complicated everyday life of men, children and work - and how we exist in it?
Sociologists speak of "patchwork identities",
to describe what is required more and more and more in the course of our life: to switch over and to adjust ourselves once again to something completely different. Reinventing ourselves time and again - that sounds good. But honestly, this task is often forced upon us by external events.
For example, when we have to say goodbye to people or rooms that have become dear. When they pack the boxes, they fall back into our hands, the photos or letters from those days - and right now, apparently, it's just the wrong moment to indulge in the memories of how it all started. Just when life really challenges us, the question of our own personality design seems more like a luxury problem. It is our answer to this very question that decides whether we still feel like writing our own story in the biggest mess. Or if we're just extras in one piece, whose screenplay was conceived by others.
From a "developed identity" speaks the psychology,
if we succeed in coping with a change in such a way that we can say: that belongs to me. I am up to it. Too bad that until today no scientist can say exactly what identity is.Because this question concerns us all more than ever before. "Who am I - and if so, how many?": The book with this title sold 800,000 copies in two years.
Its author Richard David Precht offers a readable introduction to philosophy - but no answer. And neither does brain research. Although the scientists certify that we can develop our personality as long as we live - the brain keeps creating new networks. It also helps us to re-tell our own story by constructing a meaningful connection from the flood of events we are exposed to. And leave out what just does not seem to fit. But who is this ominous "I", which creates in our mind again and again - the brain researchers do not know. This can not be detected with any sophisticated high-tech diagnostics. We have to answer that question ourselves.
Not every life is made to redesign at the age of fifty.
Even the unreal is part of our identity, says the Zurich psychotherapist Verena Kast - if we make it conscious and accept. If we admit that no great musician, visual artist or writer has been lost to us - but that music, painting or writing can enrich our lives. Maybe in the future even more than in the past, when we had to subject everything we did to a sharp cost-benefit analysis: is it worth it? Does it promise success?
Now is the time for a more caring look also at what we did not succeed, maybe because it was just too hard. Perhaps it was right not to take a career opportunity, not to move to this other city, not to stand and leave everything for this man? Not always is the venture a better choice, it does not always open the door to a more exciting, richer life. Nothing compels us to devalue or forget those dreams that we have not realized - they are part of our everyday routine.
It is this age in which some people decide
to go back to the place where they grew up. In the old friendships to revive and suddenly become very important. In which new partnerships often result in class reunions: is not that the type I never trusted in the 12th grade? A bit gray and wrinkled he is already, a bit more belly he has, but he is still interesting. And only now he confesses to me that he had a crush on pocketbook at the time. Did we miss 30 years together? No, we have grown on something else.
No, this is not a call to go "inside us".
Finding oneself, the search for one's own identity - for me it is a lofty idea that this would be accomplished primarily through intensive self-questioning on a lonely hike. In any case, I do not need the Way of St. James, but interaction, experience, encounter. And someone who says to me: Just as challenging and defiant, you've already looked into the world when you were four years old. For the unmistakable in us is often what we least recognize ourselves. So what was this life-line, which in the eyes of my friend 30 years ago with me signed off? I want to know more. We have to meet soon, absolutely!
