Many identities

Tonight I watched a documentary film as part of my course assignments called Between:  Living in the Hyphen (Nakagawa, 2005). It talks about what it feels like to exist in between multiple cultures. I resonated with this idea that one's culture can have a lot of say in how one aligns oneself as well as the locations of meaning that a person has around themselves. I also believe it's important and valuable to know a person's location(s) in terms of how they identify themselves: not necessarily in terms of a physical location but more like an inner narrative that helps a person to know how they might be seen by others and where they might be in their personal time lines of life.
  Knowing that the sense of identity shifts might make a person conclude that there might not be any point in knowing "who" one is. Can a person ever establish an identity if they are coming from completely different cultural worlds? However, I don't quite agree with this view, because knowing one's ideas about who one is can help a person recognize what kinds of meanings they see in the situations around them. In a conversation between friends, for instance, there could be a knowledge of the exact same words between both friends, but this doesn't necessarily mean that the two friends will see the same meanings in those words. Their cultural locations may be so different that it is impossible to locate a particular point of agreement. But if I know where I am coming from with some degree of clarity, I might recognize where I don't see eye to eye with someone else: it's not about "one person seeing the truth" vs "the other not seeing the truth" but more about differences in what the person's priorities and values might happen to be. The "truths" we live are not fixed in stone, but are based on the lives we are choosing to forge for ourselves moment to moment.

Nakagawa, Anne Marie, Between: Living in the Hyphen. https://www.nfb.ca/film/between_living_in_the_hyphen/