Identity, Lost and Regained

Psychologist Erik Erikson once wrote that identity is like a good conscience: It is never maintained once and for all but constantly lost and regained. Adult development, he argued, is a process that requires both questioning and commitment.^[6] The person who neither questions nor commits to a course of action obviously goes nowhere. Questioning that does not lead to a new (or renewed) commitment, as in the case of the perpetual student or the devoted dilettante, is not much better. Commitment without questioning produces an “organization man” who has no identity beyond title and function. To be a growing adult means to make commitments that are informed by prior questioning. As one of the career changers in this study put it, “There are two types of people. Some are always jumping. Some never jump—they settle down too easily and get stuck.”

Self-renewal requires some jumping and some settling back in. The kind of reinvention considered here is not a personality makeover; it is a process and practice that allows us to get back in touch with forgotten selves, to reorder priorities, and to explore long-standing or newfound interests. As in most voyages of discovery, the end points are never quite as we imagined them, and they are rarely the ones we originally charted. Sometimes all we know at the start is that we want to be somewhere else. “The end of all our exploring,” as T. S. Eliot reminds us, “will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” In between, we try on unfamiliar roles and experiment with trial identities, always updating our goals and methods, with each step coming closer and closer to becoming ourselves again.