Identity: Who Am I? And Why Don’t I Know?

“I don’t know who I am any more.”

How often do you have this thought? And how long’s it been going on? That thought that you’ve lost yourself, or never really knew who you were in the first place.

“ I don’t know who I am any more.”

  Yes, you’re someone’s child, sibling, partner, parent, friend. But underneath all that, who are you, really?

 I had identities: an idea of who I was, depending on who I was with and what they expected from me. But they didn’t fit very well, like I was wearing someone else’s clothes. And they were heavy.

Identity is fundamental to our being: if we don’t know who we are, we don’t know what we like, what we want. It goes much deeper than which food, films or activities we like or whether we want holidays, cars or clothes.

When we don’t know who we are, we don’t know what our dreams are, what we’re good at, what our talents are, our gifts. And if we don’t know what’s important to us in the tiny detail of our everyday and in the grand scheme of life, we begin to lose any idea of the direction we want our life to go, and to the connection of our purpose in the world.

So why don’t we just know who we are?

 So you can see how we develop many traits, but I’m guessing you recognise these in yourself:

 Anxiety: We don’t feel secure in our own internal strengths or our ability to make decisions, and feel like life is controlled by external factors.

We base our expectations of the future on what happened in the past, and if those experiences were hard, we expect the future to be the same. The unknown future has become a frightening place.

Depression: We spend your time living in the past, either with regret or rose-tinted glasses. We do this because the present has also become frightening, or life is too hard.

‘If only…’ becomes a common phrase you hear yourself saying. We might ask ourselves those questions - what’s the meaning of life, why am I here?

Self-doubt: If we don’t know who we are, that includes any kind of inner strength, talent, knowledge, skills we have.  We are always comparing ourselves to others and all we see are our flaws and shortcomings.  Even the ones that aren’t actually true.

Self-doubt is actually the main reason many of us never fulfil our potentials. And that in itself can circle back to feed the depression.

 Self-sabotage: This really stumps us – why don’t I seem to be able to do what I want to do? Why doesn’t it happen for me, even though I really want it?

Our mind uses our past to protect us, and it is wholly unconscious until we learn which inner saboteurs we have, how they got there, and what they’re trying to save us from.

During October I will be sharing information about something that is absolutely fundamental to our identity, and that is our Core Values & Purpose.

Its not something we think about very much, its certainly not something we’re taught, and as a single topic rarely comes up in conversation.  Even during my Psychology degree (a few years ago now, things may have chamged), I rarely heard it spoken of as part of personality or development.  So its no wonder we may be totally unaware of what our core values are – there are so many that it might take some thought and reflection to actually sift through and work out which 5 (a good round number to work with) make up the core of who we are. They form our deepest self, and because we may not have looked deeply before, we don’t know what they are without some thought.

 There will be learnings, exercises and journalling prompts in a free workbooks to help you work out which core values drive you, and which you can use to make decisions that are right for you.  There will also be a self-study workbook you can use to go deeper into values and identity discovery.

Next: Understanding Your Values : A Path to Authentic Living