Today it seems relatively impossible to have a discussion without offending someone. Moreover, it appears increasingly difficult to say or do anything without someone feeling offended. Perhaps this has always been the case, perhaps not, but it should be an obvious reality that one cannot be offended unless one chooses to be offended, and yet individuals often claim to be slighted even when most of the time it is clear that no one is intentionally trying to hurt someone else. In such instances it seems it is no longer about some real aspect of one’s self, or some important issue that needs defending, and more like some fabricated construct that one feels like asserting.

When someone is offended it is because he or she identifies with an issue or with a particular label associated with one side of an issue. That is, a person claims to identify with a specific label; “I am a…” or “I identify as…” Thus one becomes offended because his or her identity feels “threatened.” So the more important question to ask becomes, “Why have an identity?”

Having an identity is associated with being unique, with “standing out,” of being different; but oddly enough the etymology of the word ‘identity’ reveals the opposite meaning. The word ‘identity’ comes from the Latin root ‘idem’ which means “the same.” What one thinks one gains through having an identity is wholly illusory. There is an even better word that stresses the illusion of an identity. The word ‘personality’ is even more revealing. Although the words ‘personality’ and ‘identity’ are not entirely equivalent, there is none the less a huge overlap; both words are used to denote individuality. And yet the word ‘personality’ comes from the Latin ‘persona,’ meaning “mask.” Individuals crave an identity and yet they are only disguises. And still, so much seems to be at stake over having one.

Being without an identity does not mean negating one’s unique qualities and characteristics; it does not negate individuality, and it does not negate one’s right to defend him or herself when being abused to a threateningly high degree. Being without an identity means owning one’s sense of aliveness generated through an awareness and acceptance of one’s feelings. Everything else, all the labels whether they refer to nationality, profession, religion, activism, etc. are truly not real in comparison. Such labels may be useful for the sake of communication, but they are not what a person is.

All identities are inherently meaningless in respect to what every individual is by birth. No raindrop, leaf, or snowflake has to do anything at all to be unique; they just are by virtue of their very being. It is the same for every human person and in fact every living thing; there is nothing any one person needs to do to be unique every person is unique by right of birth; every person is composed of a unique set of characteristics because of a unique individual history against a unique setting and backdrop. The important question is, why is this not good enough?

One does not have to do anything to have a strong sense of self except be able to own and accept one’s feelings, desires, emotions, and thoughts, but these are precisely the very things a person is often running from. This sense of affirming what one is by birth is different from assuming or asserting an identity. An identity is what one asserts when one has lost contact with who and what one really is. It’s what one asserts in order to forget one’s self.

Of course such inherent characteristics as one’s inner feelings are not “flashy” and they do not make one stand out externally as much as one may want, but that is because an individual is not comfortable with his or her inner characteristics; it is one’s inner character and feelings that make one feel whole and yet these are precisely the things one is often running from, often because they involve repressed emotions and painful memories. It is this having to run away that makes “standing out” externally seem like a justifiable and necessary attraction when in reality it is only a façade, an escape. Such behavior is an “acting out,” where ‘acting’ here means “performing a fictional role,” and ‘out’ means departing from one’s inner sense of self.

Many people often try to stand out from the crowd without realizing that before one may stand out from a crowd one must be standing in a crowd. One often assumes that by standing out he or she is asserting an individual identity. But standing out really means standing in since it takes a crowd in order to stand out from a crowd. The consequences of this are that even when one is intentionally trying to be unique and assert themselves, that desire is still dependent on other people, on the crowd; one’s self is still dependent on and mediated through others when the truth is that one does not have to do anything at all.