Identity
What are you?
Do we really know the answer to this question, or do we simply pretend to know it? The question is not as simple as it sounds; it carries a depth that often hides quiet agony beneath it.
We are all, at heart, the main character of our own lives. And yet, whatever we do or say, we feel compelled to give it enough reason to justify who we believe ourselves to be.
Today, I am going to share a decisive experience; one that caused me to lose my whole identity, rendering me unrecognisable to myself. The person I believed I was, the kind of person I thought I could place neatly into a category; a “good” human being, someone incapable of hurting another, someone who understood pain and how it feels to be wounded, suddenly felt unfamiliar.
I believed I was secure and independent in every sense: emotionally, physically, financially. But all of it was a delusion, merely a mirage. The image I had constructed in my mind. In reality, that self did not exist at all.
There are moments in life that shake our soul to its depths and ruthlessly pull us out of our fairy tales. Something like that happened to me. A cold breeze that woke me from a dream in which everything made sense. In reality, nothing did.
It is bizarre how a single moment can have the power to completely snatch away your personality and hand you an identity you cannot recognise. No matter how hard you try, you are unable to align with this new version of yourself.
I spent more than half my life under the illusion of who I was. Only now do I see that this self was largely sustained within my own consciousness. What shattered this certainty was not abstract doubt, but confrontation; the kind that comes only from those closest to one’s heart.
When the people who matter most become the bearers of truth, their words do not argue; they expose. They hold up a mirror that cannot be turned away from and say, “Look; this is what you are.”
The violence of that moment lies here: the reflection staring back is unrecognisable. The soul recoils; not in denial, but in estrangement. The self that appears in the eyes of others does not align with the self one has lived with internally.
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Between these two versions, a rift opens. Into that rift fall certainty, identity, and moral ground. What emerges is not clarity, but dread. I begin to suspect that the life I lived was not grounded in reality, but in self-construction.
I no longer know how to exist. I do not know how to act, whether restraint is honesty or cowardice, whether calm is maturity or avoidance. Every gesture feels compromised. Every stance provisional.
At the core of this crisis lies one question: Who actually defines the self?
Is it inward consciousness, the private intentions, values, and self-recognition only I can access? Or is it the external world, which reveals me through consequence, impact, and the suffering or disruption I leave behind?
If the self is only what is intended, it risks becoming illusion.
If the self is only what is perceived, it risks becoming exile.
I find myself suspended between these two truths; belonging fully to neither. I have lost authority over my own meaning, yet cannot surrender it entirely to others. I am trapped in a labyrinth where reflection no longer leads outward, only inward and inward there is no stable ground.
And so the question remains, stark and unanswered:
Was I ever who I believed myself to be?
And if not, who am I now, once the illusion has been stripped away?
Who gets to decide that?
Poonam
