I’ve been writing notes on two topics, security and identity, and I just realized that, together, they are actually one topic. For me, at least.

I was always looking for someone else to provide me with security. I’ve never been willing to provide security for myself, even in sobriety. My relationship with security makes up a big part of how I see myself.

In relationships, I would look for someone to care for. Subconsciously, I was looking for someone who could do for me what I refused to do for myself – care for me. By being a caretaker, I was banking on a ‘return on my investment’ down the road. Of course, that never came to fruition – my partners either grew able to care for themselves and no longer needed me, or I would leave them first to avoid future rejection.

I was career-focused during my twenties and early thirties, often working up to 70 hours weekly at its peak. In my 17 year career in advertising, I went from production artist to senior art director and copywriter with only a high school education. But, in the end, I had nothing to show for it. I spent what I earned because I was living in active addiction. The thought of putting money away for retirement was furthest from my mind. I didn’t expect to live that long!

During those years, I identified as a tortured creative soul, working in an immoral industry. I constantly struggled with being torn between doing creative work, getting paid for it, and selling my soul to the world of advertising and marketing. That conflict was fuel for my alcoholism. (I also worked in an industry in which alcohol and drug addiction was commonplace.)

I always had dreams of living in a spiritual community of some kind; not religious, but more like a peaceful hippie commune at one with the land. Everyone lives interdependently, all labour is valued and its fruits experienced directly by the collective. For me, this is true security. I’ve come close to fulfilling that vision a couple of times, but addiction and other mental health challenges interrupted any real opportunity for it to succeed.

I moved back home a few times, my longest stay being the most recent: from 2015 to 2019. During this period, I was given the opportunity to care for my dying father, and everything about my understanding of security flipped around. As caregiver, I was giving my father the ability to remain in his home, the house my siblings and I were raised in. I was providing him with security in his final years. But in this case, there would be no return on my investment down the road – it was a duty of love and of gratitude for all the security he provided for me over my lifetime since the day I came into this world.

Today, there is no one left for me to lean on. Unemployed, unattached, and without children of my own, I must provide for my own security. I am recovering from depression and addiction, so as long as I focus on this healing journey, I will one day find the strength and energy to work to make sure I keep myself fed and with a roof over my head.

I used to believe that identity was something within me, like a key-card or a QR-code that fit only me, a one-in-eight-billion marker that tells the story of ‘who I am’.

Today, I understand identity to be strictly a relative phenomenon, best described by the use of examples. First, identity cannot exist without connection to others and their respective identities: I was a son because I had parents. Second, identity contains perceived value: if I am a locksmith, I serve others; if I am a safe-cracker, I am a thief. Third, identity is a socio-historical construct: the person I am today is constructed by how I have seen myself in relation to others throughout my life (and how others have seen me).

Anyone living in complete isolation ‘loses themselves’. I experienced this over the past nine years, shutting myself away from close contact with other people. I became increasingly neurotic. I was living in a house of mirrors, every facet reflecting some form of who I once was or who I might have become. The ‘real me’ standing in the centre, alive in the present moment, was emptied of any meaningful sense of selfhood. I had come to no longer recognize the man in the mirror.

My experience has taught me that ‘I’ cannot exist without the presence of ‘You’. Every person’s identity is in a constant state of intersubjective flux: as soon as we try to present our identity to another person, it has already changed through the very encounter itself. Yet, in isolation, identity unravels and we lose all grip on sanity.

We need each other to remain in contact with our ever-changing selves.