A personal reckoning with how the self is shaped, shed, and rediscovered.
The Question That Starts It All: What Is Identity? Who Am I, Really?
I ask myself the same question a lot… Who am I now after I can drop all the ideas of who I thought I was…. Teacher, chef, son, sexologist, strong, generous, listener, music lover, complainer, happy guy, angry man, etc. How do I explain the version of myself that learned to survive and thrive?
Then I begin to wonder what forms my identity and the kind of person I am today. At first, my family, culture, work, and responsibility began to put the words to define and tell the story of who I am. As I write this… How do I get to explain myself to myself? Makes me laugh to read this.
Some of these words might help explain the story of identity…
Temperament is what I was born with. How sensitive I am. How much of a risk taker I am. Do I approach or avoid? What is my natural pace in life? How much stimulation or quiet time do I need?
Emotionality is what I feel, how deeply they land, how long to they stay? How do I express emotions? How attuned to others am I? Am I naturally an empath? Solitarian or need to talk things out?
Personality is about behavior. How I relate with people, connect or pull back? Lead or observe? Am I a calming presence? Am I agreeable or confrontational? Adaptive or inflexible?
Character is about choices. Principles and values I refuse to abandon. My behavior when no one is watching. How I carry suffering. How I treat people who do not bring me anything. What I do with my power. How do I respond when life collapses?
This was the original version — quiet, unprotected, unfiltered. I didn’t choose any of this. I just was this way when I was born. Before any spoken language, before familial or societal expectation, before any performance. There was a natural rhythm.
The Person I Became in My Family
The first step in how my identity was shaped, was in my resistance, not in compliance. I sensed early that something in the family system wasn’t right and didn’t fit. I could feel the unspoken demand for loyalty — the kind of loyalty that asks you to shrink, to stay quiet, to fall in line as if the family were a monarchy and the only acceptable act was obedience. But I couldn’t do it.
I refused to give up the parts of myself that noticed the hypocrisy, or felt the injustice, or saw the emotional games for what they were. So, I became the black sheep, the one who refused the script, the one whose honesty exposed what everyone else preferred to hide.
I was not the peacekeeper, not easily agreeable, or the child who smoothed things over. I was the one who questioned what didn’t seem right. I refused to pretend something wasn’t happening. In a family that mostly valued silence, my honesty was confrontational.
There was a decision I made long ago, most likely not consciously, I wasn’t going to disappear to make others comfortable. I made a commitment long ago, to self-preservation, to be true to myself, my experience, my feelings, my desires. The part of me that still refuses to hand my life over to anyone’s narrative but my own.
The Person I Became Because the World Rewarded Me
(Work identity / usefulness / capitalism)
As I grew, I began shaping a life for myself, or at least I thought I was. I had ideas of what I wanted to do, but life also made its demands on me. I learned quickly that being good at something wasn’t just a skill, it was also a form of currency.
People relied on me to perform. I was respected and rewarded for being strong, consistent and capable. And the world, especially a capitalist one, rewarded that.
In a culture where productivity is considered as our purpose, it becomes easy to believe that your work is how you identify yourself. Most people never even question this. Our jobs become the answer to the question “Who are you?” long before we dare to realize that this question needed a different response.
It was that way for me. Chef, Restauranteur, Professor, Facilitator, Sacred Intimate.
I became the strong and reliable one, the one people could count on. And for a long time, that identity worked, both for them and for me. But somewhere along the way, I confused my competence with my identity. I misconstrued my functional usefulness inside the business or academic structures for my inherent value.
Because capitalism teaches us that if we stop being productive, we stop mattering. It was this message that was buried in me more deeply than I ever could understand.
This “seen” version of myself wasn’t completely false. It just wasn’t entirely true. I had built my identity around survival, contribution and reward. But the truth of the self isn’t constructed from usefulness, approval or what anyone can take from you.
The true self is what remains when all the performing stops. The core personal values are mine. The desires I buried to stay responsible and conflict free. The boundaries I didn’t believe I was allowed to have. My natural flow and rhythm that was overridden. How I want to live my current day-to-day life has nothing to prove.
This newly revealed identity, the one emerging, is what survived all the expectations.
The Person My Roles Required
(Relational identity / emotional labor / responsibility)
As I stepped further into my adulthood, I didn’t stop to ask “Who am I?”. Life asked me a different question… in terms of my relationships with people…. What can I hold?
So I stepped further into the roles put in front of me… teacher, leader, partner, friend, the emotionally grown-up one, the secure one. The man who could be a trusted confidant with other people’s delicate stories.
None of these roles were forced upon me. In many ways I chose them fully and willingly. But once I decided to step into these roles they began shaping me just as much as I was shaping them.
I didn’t have to think about being dependable. Showing up in my strength became expected. I am lucky it came natural for me. My developed emotional intelligence and emotional availability became a service to others. People gained deep trust in me, and I was highly honored to be the recipient and did not take it lightly.
These roles never asked me if I had the qualifications, bandwidth or capacity. They only asked if I wanted to continue doing what I was doing.
At some point I slipped into a life where other people’s needs began defining where I directed my time, my attention, my presence. It was other’s people’s expectations of me that shaped my sense of self long before I noticed it happening.
This was a meaningful, beautiful and at times, a deeply fulfilling time in my life. But even the roles I loved playing came with their own expectations. Something I had to maintain as long as my performance held to others’ expectations.
I didn’t realize how much of myself was woven into these roles, until the day life started asking me if I wanted to live a little differently.
Who I Thought I Was
(Mirror identity / perception)
For a long time in my 40’s I truly felt I was the person I was meant to be. I didn’t feel like I was playing a role for anyone. There was no adapting or performance. I thought I was simply just being myself. Why would I think any different? And everyone around me reflected that version with such consistency that it felt like the truth.
When people see you in a certain way for long enough, you stop noticing it’s a reflection of themselves and not you. You start believing it’s a definition of yourself.
What took me years to understand was how easily other people’s gratitude felt like identity confirmation. Their dependence on me felt like purpose. The more people put their trust in me, the more I mistook that trust as a mirror of who I was.
What took me a long time to understand was how easily other people’s gratitude felt like an identity confirmation. Their dependence on me felt like purpose. The more people put their trust in me, the more I mistook that trust as a mirror of who I was.
It was too easy to confuse being needed with being seen. A confusion of being valued with being known.
Looking back, this was another case of a misplaced identity. Perceiving the version of me that served people as the version that was actually me. A self, shaped more by responsibility and expectation, than my personal desire and choice.
How I was seeing myself and the identity I had been living was not the full story of who I was. It was the story that was working for me and the world at that time.
And as my world began to change, this story no longer fit. I could feel the shifting. But do I have an open mind enough and am I willing to see it?
Midlife Cracking Open
(Loosening, shifting, not fitting)
The roles I was playing in my life began shifting. The external world stopped asking for the same version of me. Life is loosening its grip.
My life was facing many big transitions. My father died, I quit my teaching job, sold my real-estate business, got rid of all my stuff, made another home halfway around the world.
My world was changing and the story I had lived for so long, no longer fit. The ground under my feet was not steady. The strange part was that there was no crisis, no meltdown, no dramatic unveiling. My life wasn’t falling apart. It was just…. different?!?!
I could feel myself questioning, “Who am I now?” All the past definitions I once used to describe my identity, from the earlier stages in my life, no longer fit in the same ways.
Was I entering into the part of midlife that nobody warned me about? The time when the old version of myself isn’t needed anymore, and I’m left waiting for the new version to fully arrive? The limbo-land. The in-between time and space. The uncomfortable and confusing middle ground where these questions become unavoidable…
If I’m not all those roles… then who am I now?
Who am I without the job title, the being of service, the structure of responsibility?
Who am I if no one is depending on me to be productive?
Who am I if I’m not the strong one, the steady one, the reliable one?
Who am I when there is no one to perform for, no one to impress, no one waiting for me to show up in a certain way?
This isn’t so much a midlife crisis as much as it’s a slow, steady realization that only most of my entire identity had expired. Not in a dramatic or painful way—more like a snake shedding its skin in order to grow.
Midlife is bringing me an unsettling kind of clarity. A sense that the version of myself I had been living wasn’t wrong, but it just wasn’t the whole story. Something in me is asking for a different way to inhabit my own life. A different way to see myself. A different kind of truth. A truth that isn’t tied to being the chef, the teacher, the strong one, or the dependable one, but to the man underneath all of that—the one I never gave myself time or permission to really know.
I’m not collapsing. Maybe a little lost at times. Trying to have some patience for myself.
I’m simply becoming more aware of the person I had been for decades is transcending into a person I am still becoming.
The Person I’m Learning to Live With Now
As I move through this stage of my life, I’m realizing that identity isn’t fixed. It shifts, dissolves, and reforms depending on what life asks of us. The versions of myself I’ve lived — the responsible one, the steady one, the useful one, the strong one — all served a purpose in their time. They weren’t mistakes. They weren’t lies. They were honest responses to the life I was living.
But now the conditions of my life are different, and the way I see myself has to evolve.
I’m learning that I don’t need to hold myself together in the same way I once did. I don’t need to be productive, or in emotional service, or succumb to the expectations of others. Those identities helped me survive and succeed, but they aren’t the only ways to describe “who I am”.
What’s emerging now is hopefully a more grounded version of myself — not relying on usefulness to feel my value, or on external reflection to feel real. A version of myself who isn’t trying to prove anything or carry the weight of the world. A version who is more interested in being present than being extraordinary.
I like to see this time of my life as a reinvention. A slow remembering of the parts of myself that were buried under responsibility, obligation, and performance.
I don’t have all the answers, even though sometimes I like to think I do. I don’t think midlife is about knowing the answers. It’s about being honest enough to make the space in my psyche when I realize old story no longer fits, and making room for the new one form, especially during the mysterious time while it’s all still taking shape.
My question still remains… who am I now?
I’m someone in the middle of a transition, like many of us are. Questioning, noticing, and paying attention. Learning to live alongside the identities that I once thought defined me, even as I let them go. Willing to let the next version of myself emerge without forcing it.
And that has to be enough for right now…
to be the person who is no longer who he thought he was,
and not yet realized who he is becoming,
but trying to be awake and honest as possible
during this time and space in-between.
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