Identity and fluid identities
Last week I was at a meeting of Het Nieuwe Licht with Marli Huijer. She spoke about sexual identity and the ambiguous impact of it- meaning identifying yourself as being for instance homo or lesbian, transgender; which, on the one hand might be empowering coming out with your identity on the other hand it mobilizes new rules related to the identity that you are supposed to conform to. Same for when you are vegetarian, people sort of use confidence if all of a sudden you do eat meet.
I find this interesting this sort of splitting in identities in our dutch or western society and that these may liberate and also limit us at the same time. According to PhD Ype de Boer, Marukami deals in his books with personalities that in stead of healing this internal splitting they learn to bear and deal with it, Marli Huijer speaks about postponing your identification to give space for further exploration leaving the identification for a later stage or not mention it at all. This phenomenon searching for identities and roles is also going on in more professional context. In this blog and thorugh linkedin I will be sharing some thoughts about identity.