No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. - Through the Gates of the Silver Key
...it is not always possible to restore oneβs boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us.
Since so much of our identity is constructed through our social relationships, which rely so heavily on language, aphasia can obliterate that feeling of belonging
