The Complexity of Identity

At one point in our lives, we all grow through an “identity crisis.”  We want to be able to not just say who we are as a person but also show what kind of person we are.  I see that Erik Erikson’s “notion that the social, cultural, and historical context is the ground in which individual identity is embedded” to be true.  I see it to be true because as infants and toddlers, before we made friends, our families shaped who we were.  We were raised how out parents were raised and our parents were raised on how their parents were raised and so forth.  As we get older and experience more of the world for ourselves different factors start to shape us and change our identity.  Factors such as the friends and significant other(s) we make outside of the family, our eating habits, sleeping habits, and the activities we decided to participate in.  As we grow we fight within ourselves to identify ourselves with our inner and outer self.  Our inner selves are being of how we were raised socially, culturally, and historically.  Out outer selves are beings of what we came to face in the world.  As we live our lives when will our “identity crisis” hit us or is it that we will always be in an “identity crisis” because we face different factors as our lives continue?