Identity and Development

Identity is something I have always been interested in on both personal and professional levels. Being a strange mixture of various ethnic backgrounds, I have always thought of what this word means personally to me and what is my explanation and condition in which I fully understand and accept myself as I am. There has always been a question in my life asked by strangers and people close to me about where I belong to from my perspective.

From the very early childhood I was trying to discover that mystery anywise. It made me nerdy somehow, because, as I have always been looking for explanations, year by year, I became more aware about a lot of things. Moreover, I think education is something that really saves us when life seems very tough and incomprehensible. I was almost nine when understood that everything hurts you until you define it. Once you become familiar with it, you can manipulate your brain endlessly and find as many solutions and interpretations as needed to cope. And also, by looking beyond of surface you can see that there is no real difference between people.

When I started studying psychology, I thought that all the people are different which means some of them are my friends and soulmates while the others are less interesting. What has changed during these four years is how I perceive people. This is probably about development, too, self-development. Eventually, we have more similarities that we think, but everyone is unique and that unites us no matter where we were born. We always have something to agree on and something to argue about. And civil society gives that advantage of being able to challenge, to criticize, to resist when you are under pressure of something imposed by force. Something which does not belong to you and, above all, you don’t belong to it as well.

Identity for me is a matter of being in my personal, cultural, civil comfort zone even if there is no comfort zone all around. I have learnt languages to understand where particularly is the comfort zone of the person in front of me, where is it linguistically, biologically, physiologically, what kind of boundaries this person set, what are the strong cultural and personal points which form these boundaries. My personal goal is to explore as much information as I can regarding subjects I am interested in and form a global understanding of things which you always lack when you hung up on all that tradition, something that no one questions. By my deepest persuasion, that is a very dangerous case, I frequently notice this in Caucasus. To be honest, that is probably the reason I want to go abroad for some time. I worked in several companies in Armenia, it was neither good nor satisfying, I felt terrible there and left as soon as I have got a chance to do another job, but it applies only to my generation.

I realize that a lot of people are forced to live a very miserable life just because there are unluckily born somewhere where there are a lot of problems. I have a friend who always affirms she feels violence and the problem is she does not belong to any minority group, she just feels that in her country when she walks the streets or buys something at the grocery shop or just uses public transport. Furthermore, she mostly experiences that in her own hometown. 

Sometimes, even existing is dangerous when there is too much unhealthy pressure and lack of freedom. First and foremost, freedom from fear of physical and psychological harm is something that according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs lets you exist and focus on your self-actualization. This is the condition when you can freely speak up your social needs and design your environment continuously being a part of civil society. When we do not feel safe, there is no motivation to occur at the next level. Moreover, life without any progress makes us sick and we do not really understand why.

Development is essential. The damage caused by inability to develop encompasses various problem areas. To say frankly, there is a curious pattern on how the collapses usually happen. A chain reaction of anger leads to explosion when people tolerate abuses for a long time. This may sound controversial, but we usually feel guilty when experiencing frustration, we’d rather ignore it and think that it is something very personal which is not fair enough to disclose, but if we look around we will notice a bunch people who feel the same. Personal and social are tightly connected on the deeper and more fundamental level. Coexistence of different people in a comprehensive manner creates various social systems aimed to maintain and aggregate people taking into the account the culture, national circumstances and ethnic characteristics. Preventing alienation, especially in the modern era, by joining communities, including workplace communities, local communities, having the opportunity to show up not feeling afraid of being noticed — that is what social development means to me.