One step further down on the ladder to self-oblivion is depersonalization—losing your sense of yourself.
Bessel van der Kolk • The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
If I am seeing the world through an identity-first lens, what happens to the image I have constructed of myself once a core part of it is challenged? In this scenario, I am forced to either:
- Subscribe to additional identity labels or come up with numerous caveats to explain why my experience contradicts that of someone else in my identity group
- Deny
sundus • I Am Me Before I Am Anything Else
…what the sociologist Michael Bury calls ‘biographical disruption.’ His work highlights how the experience of illness or breakdown ruptures the fabric of normal life and forces us to rethink our relationships to our bodies, our lifeworld, our mortality, our values and our identity.
Vincent Deary • How We Break
