The sociologist Charles Horton Cooley said, ‘I am not who I think I am; I am not who you think I am; I am who I think you think I am.’
Our very identity is shaped by who the people around us think we are. We often suffer from identity crises because of conflict between the identity that we ascribe to ourselves and our identity in the minds of the people around us.
A related truism here is the saying that we are the average of the 5 people we most associate with. If we suffer from identity crises, a short term fix is to carefully surround ourselves with the right 5 people. True liberation from this conflict lies in separating our identity completely from what other people think of us.
Observations 