Identity

Identity is not a statue you carve once and stand beside for the rest of your life. It is a living thing. It breathes, it shifts, it sheds, and it grows back differently. And so much of what we call "me" was never chosen by us at all.

We absorb identity from our parents before we can speak, from school before we can question it, from peers who are just as lost as we are, from a society that rewards some shapes and punishes others. Be good. Be useful. Be strong. Be quiet. Be successful. Be agreeable. Be enough. These messages land like seeds and we spend years watering them, believing they are our own soil.

Then we become parents, and another identity arrives. It is often wanted, deeply wanted. Mother. Father. Carer. The one who holds everything. It can be beautiful, and it can also quietly consume the person underneath. The labels begin to wear you like a costume. You are so busy being needed that you forget how to be known. You confuse doing with being, and one day you catch yourself in the mirror and wonder who is looking back.

And then life changes. The children grow up and move out. The job ends. The relationship ends. The body changes. The role that organised your entire sense of self is no longer there. You are left standing in a quiet room, wondering who you are without the label. That is grief. It is grief for an identity, for a version of yourself that only existed inside a certain context, and it deserves as much tenderness as any other loss.

It is not selfish to mourn who you were. It is not indulgent to ask who you are becoming. The work is gentle: to sort what is truly yours from what was handed to you, to let the borrowed identities return to their owners, and to make room for the self that has been waiting underneath all along.

"If no one needed you, who would you be? If no one was watching, what would you want? The answer is not selfish. It is the beginning of coming home."