Identity & Sense of Self — Martin Alderton

What it can feel like A life that looks like a life, lived slightly to one side of you.

You do the things. You hold the roles, answer to your name, meet the people you’re meant to meet. From the outside it looks like a life, and by most measures it is a good one.

And underneath there is a kind of vacancy. A sense of going through it rather than being in it. Days pass and you are present for them without quite being in them, as though the life is happening slightly to one side of you.

A figure in white standing small before the monumental word VACANCY carved as a deep architectural recess of light and shadow.

A monumental serif ‘Th’ with a hand reaching down from above, a single finger resting on the crossbar — reaching for something that has no clear cause to point to.

There is often no story to tell that would make someone understand. Nothing happened. No loss you could point to, no event that would explain it. Which can make the feeling harder to take seriously — easy to set against everything you have and call self-indulgent.

It tends to persist anyway, underneath the gratitude and the counting of blessings, quietly unmoved by them.

A figure in a long coat descending a sculptural staircase built from the monumental letters ‘It’ and an ampersand — a life gone quietly through the motions.

Where it comes from

Most people who arrive with this have already tried to reason their way out of it. Listed what is good. Named what they should feel. Reminded themselves of everyone who has less. And found the feeling still sitting there underneath, untouched by the argument.

A lone figure in a long coat standing before a monumental architecture of type reading ‘most people who arrive with this have already tried to reason their way out of it — and found the feeling still sitting there underneath, untouched by the argument’.

A serene upturned face balanced on a concrete plinth within a monumental serif letter, set with the words ‘that is worth taking seriously rather than’ — the feeling given weight rather than argued away.

That is worth taking seriously rather than overriding, because the feeling is not a failure of perspective. It is information.

A self is not something most of us are handed and then simply have. For many people it gets assembled early, out of what the surroundings required — what kept things steady, what was welcome, what was too much. You become fluent in being what the moment needs. It is an intelligent thing to learn, and it works — and it can leave you successful and unseen, including to yourself. The cost arrives later, and quietly: somewhere in the fluency, your own register — what you actually want, what you are drawn to, what you feel before you have worked out what you are supposed to feel — gets turned down so low it stops reaching you.

A small figure sits atop the monumental word SELF, which rests on a precarious spiral tower of stacked concrete slabs while a giant hand slides one block out — a self assembled early from what the surroundings required.

Two hands reaching toward one another across monumental type reading ‘then nothing is wrong and something is missing’, not quite touching.

Then nothing is wrong, and something is missing, and the two are hard to hold at once.

What is easy to miss is that something registers the difference. Something in you knows the distance between going through a life and being in one, or there would be no vacancy to feel. The emptiness is being noticed — and noticing is not nothing.