Ok, I'm going to have another crack at identity. I am still in whirl of thoughts, i feel like I'm caught in a spin of wind and leaves but here goes because sometimes putting words to page helps me to make sense of the clatter and rattle, the whisper and whirl. 
Identity has been a summer long point of contemplative focus and one of the things I've been thinking about is identity and social media and the internet. The internet is a bizarre phenomenon, being half way through a century my history spans back to a time when it was unimagined in everyday minds. My children and more so my grandchildren surely could not conceive of a life without it. 
And what has the internet become ? It arrived as a blank space in my life about fifteen/twenty years ago. And probably common to many middle-aged users I have left a heavy trail over those years. I didn't know when I chose my email address that I'd still be using it twenty years on, or any of the user names I have on various social media platforms. Now when I'm asked for my email address i apologise because it feels pretentious and silly but it's the name I gave myself then and I don't care enough to change it. 
Way back before facebook became a thing people used friends re-united and my space to link to their yesterdays and to display themselves to a fairly exclusive world. I don't even know if those two platforms/ethereal places exist anymore, I imagine my space might be quite interesting for fans of retro and vintage. I never used either, in fact I scorned them, like round robin emails they turned me off. Odd really because facebook is a bit like all those things rolled into one, perhaps that's the secret of it's success. 
Because facebook, beast that it is, is huge. Being half a hundred or perhaps too dreamy I can't keep pace with the whole thing. I think I got lost at drop-box and haven't found my way to Instagram, linked-in is awful and Tumblr conjures up images that maybe I don't want to see, Pinterest too but Pinterest is very browsable. I am active on facebook, am a bit hooked on facebook if I'm honest, which means that intermittentantly I have to withdraw just to come back to my self. Here is where I connect to identity and some of the thinking I've been doing of late, and over the years. 
I think I have touched on how our identities are often given to us by others from pre-birth onwards - lord, who knows, maybe it goes back even further, I may pick that up later - and is perpetuated by those who surround us and later who we surround ourselves by. 
But this brand new blank space that opened up way back at the end of the last century, offered each one of us a chance to recreate our being and our sense of self. I know, for me, writing my blog has given me a voice, has allowed me to expose elements of myself that in conversation might easily create a very uneasy atmosphere, conflict, disapproval, disavowel. But in a blog, which is my notebook, my journal, to hell with it, lets lay social niceties to one side be as open and bare as possible, lets lay by the fear of being socially ostracised and say this, this is me, this is my story, my story, refute it if you will, but I claim this as my country, my land. 
Is identity a country ? Is that where nationalism stems from ? When I speak of country I speak of country as spiritual matter more than physical terrain but maybe those states of being are one thing that each of us relates to according to our temperament. 
How does that connect to identity ? Hmm. 
On facebook my identity shifts, I am friends with some 300 people in theory, and whilst not denigrating any of those people or friendships the reality is that most of those people I don't know or barely know, or knew years ago. Facebook is a very, very peculiar place. It's a superstore, a Walmart, fluorescent lighting and musak, it has everything and nothing. I use it to scrapbook, often posting just to myself so it acts like a catalogue of ideas. But my face to the outside varies and has changed over time. Sometimes I am shout-y, fed up with politics, begging, or berating, the world to engage, please engage, use less plastic, vote Labour, sign this. Sometimes I post personal stuff, family pictures, or photos of places I've been to, or I might make public some of the things that have come to me from the internet, music, images, articles, and often I'll share my blogs to my page so that friends or those interested will know I've been scribbling or posted a picture of something. All those aspects of me are me and yet something about my facebook identity feels unwholesome. The unwhole-iness is perhaps the centre of the conundrum. How can I be whole in that sphere which is so very unphysical and in many ways unyielding and enclosed ? The air on facebook is often stale, breathed and filtered and breathed again and again and again.   
I think I mention this because it's hard to pick up nuance and intention on facebook, it's designed for pedestrian encounters, the surface self, when it goes deeper darker aspects of our selves can emerge unchallenged by the restraints of face to face, or day to day, contact. If I know you as a person rather than a string of mostly quite carefully edited images and ideas I will know you differently to if I spend time with you, drink tea, eat cake, hoot with laughter, maybe dance, maybe cry, walk, talk, practice yoga ...  Of my three hundred and whatever friends, some I know from other times and I love to see pictures of them happy and smiling, sharing the delights of their lives and I am sad when they post their sorrows, but lots I have never met, I have linked to them through a mutual interests, art or words or maybe politics, we share a world but our concrete realities are separate. But then there are my specials (I'm guessing we all have those) the people we really cherish, our best-best friends, our families, our comforters. 
Oh what does that have to do with identity ? Recently I went to a short workshop with Hayley Matthews who is currently working on a dance piece called Home-Solo to be performed at the end of November https://norwichartscentre.co.uk/events/home-solo/?spektrix_bounce=true. This is a point within a work in progress that she began four years ago. I have watching with interest the evolution of her ideas and was really happy to be able to learn more through participating in this workshop which took the form of a guided conversation, physical and spoken. Sharing ideas about home in a sensitive held environment with thoughtful, interesting and interested others was a real gift. I mention this workshop because, amongst other things thought, it got me thinking about how much identity is wrapped up in the place we call home. The discussion that happened in the workshop was open ended, there was no right thought or wrong thought, no definite because in each of us, perhaps, resides our home and that which makes us feel at home, and no other can really prescribe that home to another, it is a belonging that belongs to the belonger. 
Oh, belonging, that is whole new blog so I will rest here with that. But surely belonging is wrapped up in identity and comfort and integrity within one's being or identity. 
I have diverged in this blog from my initial intent it is often and commonly the way but maybe I will find my way back to an intersecting pathway and be able pick up threads I have put down but still care about as I continue my journey. My search is still active.