Identity.

You don't know who I am. I don't know who you are. We are the only people in the world who can fully understand ourselves and it leaves us standing rather alone. Unless somebody has acquired an ability to mind read we really are just 7 billion islands floating separately as in our minds we grow and nurture a sense of being.

There is no way of fully knowing another human being. We may understand their behaviour, study their habits and learn to predict how they think but we can never know exactly what they are thinking within the many layers of consciousness the brain is supporting.

This ambiguity between each and every one of us strongly upholds the necessity we have for identity. Identity is the way we build bridges between each island as we project an idea of who we believe ourselves to be onto our exterior image. We wear different types of clothes to distinguish the certain community, religion or sub culture we are a part of - an indicator of a thought process: conformist or non conformist? We share music tastes, create fan clubs and idolise celebrities collectively to demonstrate what and who we identify with culturally. We keep mementos in our bedrooms with pictures and souvenirs and old toys to document our past identity and how it has accumulated to our current one. We label our personalities with "neurotic" "happy-go-lucky" "laid back" "highly strung" to indicate to others how we respond to emotion and how that affects our being.

I express my thoughts and ideas with anyone who will listen, preferably through the medium of writing, in order to imprint my own identity somewhere in this highly cluttered world. My physical identity demonstrates my desperate attempt to distinguish it from everyone else's. I exhaust myself trying to stick out like a sore thumb in a world full of people trying to do the exact same thing.

But it is how we connect, with our identities, and the greater effort made to discover and accept the fluidity of who we are the greater the relationships we will have. At the same time as establishing our own identity we search for those who can help us understand it. We search for those who share little bits of our sense of being so that eventually we do not end up as solitary islands in our own sea of thoughts but as a connected body with an answer for all our quirks somewhere in the world.

Identity is vital and if you are lucky enough to have settled and established an identity that provides a sense of security and togetherness then bask in the ability to feel at once unique and wholly supported in a world full of tiny islands reaching out to you as you happen to pass.