The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Who We Are.
I know some people may assume I have things broadly figured out.
I really don’t.
Part of the reason I write is because writing helps me make sense of what I am thinking. The finished article is usually the tidied-up version of a much messier internal conversation: half-formed ideas, second thoughts, overthinking, deleting, walking away, coming back, and occasionally wondering whether the whole thing was just an elaborate way of avoiding doing something more useful with the dishwasher.
But the process matters. It helps me notice what is going on underneath the surface. It gives shape to things that might otherwise stay vague, restless or just slightly annoying in the background.
Recently, I have been thinking about identity.
Not in the dramatic sense. Not the cinematic version where someone buys a motorbike, leaves a hand-written note on the kitchen table, and starts wearing linen.
More in the quieter, more ordinary sense of noticing how much of who we think we are is built in relationship with the world around us.
Our work, yes. But also our families, friendships, marriages, losses, communities, routines, histories and the people who remember versions of us we sometimes forget.
We are not self-contained little identity units, however much modern life tries to convince us otherwise. We are shaped by what we do, who we love, who loves us, who needs us, who sees us, who misunderstands us, and who somehow manages to make us feel twelve years old again within three minutes of entering a room.
Usually a family member. Usually over Christmas.
Psychologist Dan McAdams describes identity as a kind of internal life story: an evolving narrative that helps us connect our past, present and imagined future into something that feels coherent. We do not just have experiences. We organise them into meaning. We tell ourselves, consciously or otherwise, who we are, where we have come from, what we have overcome, what we are becoming and why any of it matters.
That idea feels deeply human to me. Most of us are carrying stories about ourselves all the time.
I am the capable one.
I am the reliable one.
I am the funny one.
I am the one who copes with everything.
I am the one people come to when things are difficult.
I am the provider.
I am the carer.
I am the person who knows what to do.
These stories can be useful. They help us function. They help us lead. They help us belong. They give us continuity.
But they can also become a little too fixed.
Over time, the story that once helped us can start to contain us. We become attached not only to who we are, but to the particular evidence that proves it. The role that proves we are credible. The relationship that proves we are chosen. The diary that proves we are needed. The family position that proves we are useful. The old version of ourselves that other people still expect us to perform, even when it no longer fits quite as comfortably.
This is where identity becomes more complicated than self-image.
Identity theory suggests that who we are is shaped partly by the roles we occupy and by whether those roles are recognised by others. We are not just private individuals deciding who we are in isolation. We are constantly receiving feedback from the world: you are valued here, you belong here, you are useful here, you matter here.
That feedback becomes part of us.
Which is why change can feel destabilising even when, on paper, everything is still broadly okay. A job changes shape, a relationship ends, children become more independent, a friendship fades, a relative dies, a community moves on. A room that used to reflect you back in a certain way begins to reflect something different. And without necessarily saying it out loud, you begin to wonder: who am I when some of the things that used to define me begin to change?
Perhaps that is partly why grief can feel so disorientating. Some psychologists suggest that when we lose someone, we are not only mourning them. We are also mourning the version of ourselves that existed with them. Certain relationships quietly anchor particular - and specific - identities, and when the relationship disappears, the self attached to it can feel suddenly unmoored as well.
That thought stops me every time.
Because we all know, or knew, people who hold particular versions of us. The friend who remembers us before we became quite so professionally polished. The parent who saw something in us before we could see it ourselves. The sibling who knows what we’re going to say before we say it. The colleague who makes us feel sharp, useful or brave. The child who still needs us, but differently now. The person whose presence allowed some easier version of us to exist, just by being there.
When those relationships change, we are not just dealing with absence. We are dealing with identity movement. That does not make us fragile. It makes us human.
Work is part of this too. A good role gives us far more than money. It gives structure, status, competence, belonging, a rhythm, a set of problems to solve and a reason to be needed. Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, argues that human wellbeing depends heavily on three psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. We need to feel that we have some agency, that we are capable, and that we are meaningfully connected to others. Work can feed all three - but so can family, friendship, community, faith, creativity, sport, caregiving, and the strange but real sense of belonging you can get from people who also know exactly how annoying it is when Teams decides to update itself two minutes before an important meeting.
The trouble is when too much of our identity is held in one place. Jennifer Crocker’s research on contingent self-worth suggests that self-esteem is not only about how much we have, but where we have placed it. If our worth depends heavily on approval, achievement, appearance or being indispensable, then any threat to those areas can feel like a threat to the self. A professional wobble becomes bigger than it is. Someone else’s independence starts to feel like rejection. Rest begins to feel suspiciously like failure. Silence begins to feel like evidence.
That feels uncomfortably recognisable. Because many of us are rewarded, especially at work, for building exactly that kind of identity. Be useful. Be impressive. Be resilient. Be the person who can take it on, who can be trusted, who sorts it out. And for a long time, that can work. It can build a career, a reputation, a confidence. It can get you invited into rooms you once hoped to enter. But it can also quietly teach you to confuse being valued with being useful.
And those are not the same thing.
The old phrase “midlife crisis” does not really do justice to this. It is too cartoonish, too narrow, too full of clichés. The research is more nuanced anyway. Developmental psychologists often describe midlife as a broad period rather than a precise age, and the more useful question is not simply how old someone is, but what roles, pressures and transitions are clustering around them.
In other words, what many people call a crisis may actually be an identity edit. A slow recognition that the story you have been living by no longer quite fits the life you are actually in.
That can happen at 35, 53 or 70. It can happen after divorce, redundancy, promotion, retirement, parenthood, bereavement, illness, burnout, success, or simply the quiet realisation that you have become very good at a life that no longer feels entirely yours.
It does not have to mean something has gone wrong. It may mean something is asking to be updated.
That is where I think hope lives.
Not in pretending these shifts are easy. They often are not. But in recognising that identity is not fixed, and that the stories we live inside can be examined, softened, revised and expanded. This is where metacognition becomes more than a slightly grand word for thinking about your own thinking. It can become a way back to yourself.
When we pause long enough to notice the story we are telling, we create a little space between the experience and the conclusion. Instead of simply thinking, “I am no longer needed,” we might ask, “What need in me is being touched by this change?” Instead of thinking, “I am less successful than I was,” we might ask, “Which version of success am I still using, and does it still belong to me?” Instead of thinking, “I don’t know who I am now,” we might ask, “Which part of me is becoming harder to ignore?”
That space matters.
It does not solve everything. It does not remove grief, uncertainty or the occasional urge to dramatically reinvent yourself after 9pm, which is usually when the worst ideas arrive wearing good shoes. But it gives us somewhere to stand.
The aim is not to reject ambition, achievement, love, belonging or external validation. I do not particularly trust advice that tells people to stop caring what others think. Most of us care. Of course we do. We still want to be respected. We still want to be loved. We still want our work to matter. We still quite like being told we have done a good job, especially if we have actually done one.
The healthier shift, I think, is not from caring to not caring. It is from dependence to relationship. From needing external validation to enjoying it. From using achievement as proof of worth to seeing it as an expression of what we value.
From asking, “Does this make me look successful?” to asking, “Does this still feel true?”
That sounds simple. It is not.
Because many of these identity structures are unconscious. We do not always realise where we have placed our worth until something threatens it. We do not always know which role has become load-bearing until it shifts. We do not always see the bargain we have made until the world stops keeping its side of it.
So perhaps the invitation is to become more curious about our own ‘scaffolding’.
Not to pull it all down in some grand act of reinvention, but to notice it. To ask what it has supported. To ask what it has hidden. To ask whether it still serves the person we are becoming.
If you are interested in exploring this yourself, you might set aside an hour on a Sunday morning with a cup of something hot and no immediate plan to optimise your entire existence by lunchtime, just because a certain Stephen demands it. Just enough space to be honest.
You might ask:
What story have I been telling myself about this phase of my life, and where does it now feel too small, too old or too borrowed?
Which relationships let me feel most like myself, and which ones quietly ask me to remain someone I used to be?
If my job title, my relationship status and my most visible achievements were taken out of the first paragraph of my life, what would still be unquestionably true?
What kind of belonging am I most hungry for at the moment - and when did I last actually feel it?
What would still feel meaningful if no one were watching?
I do not think these questions produce neat answers - at least, they didn’t for me. In fact, I would be mildly suspicious if they did. The point is not to solve identity like a business problem. The point is to bring into awareness some of the patterns that quietly shape us.
Because identity is not something we discover once and then defend forever. It is something we keep revising.
Some parts of the story stay. Some need to be rewritten. Some were inherited. Some were useful for a time. Some helped us survive. Some helped us succeed.
And some may now be asking, gently but insistently, to be put down.
There is something hopeful in that. Because the loosening of an old identity is not only a loss. It can also be the beginning of a more honest relationship with ourselves and with others. One less dependent on status. Less frightened by change. Less fuelled by proving. Less attached to being needed as the only evidence of being loved. Less willing to outsource our worth to things that were never designed to hold it.
I do not have this figured out.
But I am beginning to think that, if we choose it, one of the quieter tasks of adulthood is learning to separate the building from the scaffolding. To be grateful for the roles, titles, relationships and achievements that have helped shape us, without asking them to carry the whole weight of who we are.
And perhaps, over time, to stand a little more firmly in the life underneath - less decorated, less certain, but more our own.
