The feeling of one’s own integrity, self-equality or, as psychologists say, identity is a very pleasant, but extremely unstable state. Keep an eye on him. You just felt whole, powerful, free, ready to respond to any challenge of fate, when suddenly, for some unknown reason, all confidence disappears, you begin to seem to fall apart, and you want to find a secluded place where you can hide, collect yourself piece by piece, glue them together, lick the wounds and regain that wonderful feeling of experiencing your whole, powerful Self. What is happening, why is the glue with which we glue our image together so unreliable, and what kind of glue is it? Everyone has their own. Everyone relies solely on their own lived and appropriated experience. We gain knowledge of what I am and what is NOT me in contact with others, with the external environment, by reading books, listening to lectures. We appropriate what lies in our hearts, when we encounter it we experience a joyful feeling of something dear and familiar, as if we were in our parents’ home. And it doesn’t matter that it was once someone else’s idea and thinking. When we encounter something that is identical to us, we appropriate it, digest it, integrate it into our own tissue. And this feeling of “our own” develops in us throughout our lives. Through trial and error, we learn to find ours among the million proposed options. For the smell, for the sound, for the feeling of joy from meeting something of our own, for the feeling of pleasure from accepting this part into your own “composition.” And we glue and glue this mosaic of ours into an incredible picture of our own image. Selecting by color, by meaning, by feeling. And here the quality and strength of the glue, which holds the integrity of the overall picture, is very important. What does this quality depend on? Probably from the ability to recognize and distinguish one’s own from someone else’s, the necessary from the useless, the desired from the imposed. Natalia Barsukova