How We Become Ourselves: Erik Erikson’s 8 Stages of Human Development

It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice cream and orgasms, gets to yearn and to suffer and to love.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing about being alive is that we are never finished and compl...