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Selfhood Insufficiency
Unwanted Aloneness
There are many conditions that contribute to our loneliness. I will differentiate between loss of companionship (unrequited love, death) and what I call selfhood insufficiency: feeling incomplete despite being loved by family and friends. A physical loss creates a vacuum that cannot be readily filled by a quick replacement. Selfhood insufficiency however, happens not by losing a person, but by losing worthiness: becoming our own worse company. I propose that mourning is essential for physical loss whereas recovery of worthiness is the remedy for selfhood insufficiency. The need to mourn the loss of someone we loved is easily understood, but recovering loses in selfhood requires understanding how we construct our external identity and what happens when one of our internal ingredients is lost or has never been cultivated.
The Ingredients of Personhood
We are complex social beings molded by the values of our cultures: ethics, socioeconomics, aesthetics, religion, and anything else considered vital for the sustainability of the tribe and our personal wellbeing. And yes, we are still tribal. Based on these cultural values, we embrace an identity cluster accepted by the standards of excellence dictated by our tribes. We then identify with our profession, family role, social status, relationships, physical…
