Dear Ian, thank you for writing this very deep piece. Your experience justifies your identity-based uncertainties, questions and conflicts to whoever might want justification from you -- certainly not me, since my justification for the swirl of thoughts in my head is far, far less. As a fellow reductionist and reader of Cavell, Nietzsche, Mann, Miller, O'Connor and Montaigne (and a senior fwiw) may I offer the thought, or confirmation thereof, that identity is an ethereal gossamer construction without any real meaning. It's just there, an infinity of images of past events, present consciousness and imagined futures. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, except they aren't missing -- they were never part of the puzzle to begin with, not even in the mind of the puzzle's designer. And in the end, there's nothing wrong with that. There might even be something right.