You can grow from anywhere. Identity is only a prison for the one who sees it as something located in time–especially if they see it as located in the past. Perhaps for some this is a useful way to relate to identity, in that they know where they never want to go back to. As Jay-Z says, it can be a foundation to grow upon. However, because identity is not located in time you can quite literally grow from anywhere. You can use your sense of identity to draw yourself to a certain future, away from an undesired past, or to be fully and wholly present now.

Professor Peter Weinreich, creator of the Identity Structure Analysis (ISA) puts it like this, “A person’s identity is defined as the totality of one’s self-construal, in which how one construes oneself in the present expresses the continuity between how one construes oneself as one was in the past and how one construes oneself as one aspires to be in the future.” Sounds intelligent to me. So how can we use this awareness to emerge in the world with the highest functioning sense of identity possible?