Relationships inform you and me whether others perceive us as whom we consider ourselves to be.
While this may be a great starting point for a philosopher or intellectual following Goethe, Erikson, or Jung, in a modern society, your identity is whom you can prove yourself to be. Bureaucracy has replaced oral recitation of your birthright ( e.g., descent of your family or tribe from Moses, Seneca, or Charlemagne). If you don’t have a driver’s license, a passport, a social security card, or another government- produced identity card, how do you prove who you are?
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2007, French intellectual (best-quotations com)
It might be unnecessary for the Queen of Great Britain to carry identity papers (there, everything official is issued in her name) but in most every country, everyday life, that is, in one’s financial and legal relations, use identity as a basis for meaningful exchange.
Most who have suffered identity theft, where unknowingly, someone has enjoyed your savings or credit to buy yachts or Teslas, or found themselves wanted in Pennsylvania for fraud ( though you have never left Nevada) are painfully aware that your identity is you.
One must be something in order to do something
Wolfgang Goethe, via best-quotations.com
As someone now engaged in an occupation that is thoroughly entrenched in institutional bureaucracy, valid identification of my prospective clients requires official documents. In a world now telling people they “are” whom they believe themselves to be, in terms of “identity”, these same folks in bureaucratic circles tell us we are whom our documents dictate.
Truths, Half-truths, and Sea Stories 