Not knowing who you are when the ordinary self has dissolved or loosened
The ordinary sense of self, as a particular person with a continuous story and a fixed identity, becomes tenuous or collapses entirely. This disorientation can be profound: not knowing who one is, how to relate to one's own history, or how to function in daily life.
Several accounts describe looking in the mirror and not recognizing the face there, or meeting old friends and not knowing how to be the person they remembered.
And all of this, the reason I'm saying all this is that it really sort of created a bedrock in my life of the question, "Who am I?" Not consciously, but subconsciously, always wondering what my identity was, and sort of feeling without a kind of identity, like not having a definite ancestral root.
And when I came back, that process of actually deciding to return to my body, my mind, my sense of self as an individual went through a transformation that completely changed my psychological makeup and also my understanding of who I was as both an individual and also as more than an individual.
And that simply reinforces the sense of self-identity.
And in realization or liberation or awakeness, it's like the sense of self-identity becomes liberated from the prison of three-dimensional reality.