We rarely attain to moments of clarity (or maturity) sufficient to acknowledge the extent to which all of our identities are really and at base quite thoroughly and irredeemably fictional.
All definitions of identity are made (and justified) by and in reference to other definitions and those themselves rest similarly upon yet more definitions in a vast and hyperbolic arc of tautological self-reference and circularity.
Recognising the ontological emptiness of identity for what is can be both an experience of harrowing psychological trauma and profound existential catharsis.
Psychological self-reflection and constructive insight in this context only really requires that a person be willing and able to suspend their disbelief in the possibility that their own self and their world of symbols and meanings was never really any more than so much abstraction, so many hollow vessels of lonely attachment, and such emptiness as the smoke and mirrors of a shared daydream.
Daedelus Kite 