I’ve had two distinct identity crises in my life.
The first came when I was 22. Life at that point in time looked exactly as I had dreamt. I was a Strength & Conditioning Coach, working with athletes and running my own training centre. Looking back it sounds naive to think I knew what I wanted my life to look like at 15—but the reality I was living was the vision I’d held since 15.
I could even see my future kids coming to work with me—running amok and engaging with all the different people they came across.
I was living my future.
Until one day I realised ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’ and my world, internal and external, crumbled around me. It rocked my grip on the world.
I am this. If I’m not this, what am I?
What ensued was the first mentally turbulent season of my life. I’d lost my tether.
The second was my initiation into fatherhood back in 2020. An experience I’m sure anyone that has raised a little human knows intimately.
One day I was Jesse—the next I was sleep deprived, completely enveloped by love, and as a Dad, feeling quite useless.
None of my friends at the time had kids. Neither of my older brothers had kids. I was also the first of 20-odd cousins on one side of the family to have kids, despite being middle of the pack in terms of age.
I knew very few Dads and none my age.
How I had lived, and engaged with the world up until that point wasn’t really conducive to my new reality. I had always been the guy with ample time for those around me.
Coffee? Sure. Run? Sure. Gym session? Sure.
Now, the guy whose identity had been completely wrapped up in always being available, was no longer available. It didn’t help that our transition into parenthood also coincided with the arrival of a certain virus a few years back and the ensuing chaos.
Again, I’d lost my tether. Although maybe this time it wasn’t a free-fall but rather a whiplash-inducing shift to an infinitely more beautiful tether.
Right now, I’m in what may have been my third identity crises.
Only now it isn’t a crisis, far from it. It’s just a season where the winds of change are blowing a little harder than usual. It has the potential to be as disruptive as the two experiences above, but I’ve found ease in my experience of change—change isn’t getting in the way of life, it is life.
This one is perhaps a slower, more autonomous burn—a gradual unlearning and relearning over the past 12 months. Some folk might call it transformative, although I feel we’ve diluted that word by slapping it into the title of every 3-month ‘container’. Really, I’m just learning a lot about who I am, what I care about and how I engage in the world.
What’s prevented a descent into chaos is that I no longer see myself as the thing I’m tethered to in any given moment.
I am not it, and so if it changes I am still me.
It’s an imperfect work in progress, but I’ve learnt to hold my identity loosely—like I’m gently tending to it over a pottery wheel, where a soft touch is as creative as a firm hand is destructive. There is still a desired form in mind, but the approach is smoother, more considered and open to change.
And maybe shaping our identity is like working with a form of clay that never dries—there is no complete—no destination to strive for. Liberation in the realisation that life isn’t about forming the perfect vessel and preserving it desperately but simply enjoying the process of tending to an ever-changing form.
This I think is one of the best gifts we can give ourselves—decoupling our identity from what we do and allowing it to be a more fluid understanding of self.
Admittedly I don’t think this would have softened the blow of the transition into fatherhood. Maybe, but that’s not an experience to optimise or get right—it’s one to just experience fully.
Identity has become a cornerstone of my work—in many ways it is the foundation.
Maybe surprisingly though, I’m not that interested in getting to a perfectly curated answer to the question who am I?
I’m more interested in your relationship with the concept of identity, than I am your actual identity. Is it an empowering force in your world? Or a disempowering one?Does it create ease? Or pressure?
To date, it seems the overwhelming experience is one of pressure—pressure to distill our incredibly complex set of interests and curiosities into a single, perfect sentence that makes sense to others.
Of course that leads us to leave out the more unique parts of us—the parts that make us who we are, but we fear might not make sense to the world. And so we offer the world the most vanilla version of ourselves—the diluted, easy-to-understand version.
If we’re lucky, those more unique parts might continue to be expressed in the quiet safety of our home, but more likely they collect dust, pushed to the far corners of our being.
I’m preaching to the converted posting this on Substack BUT if we are to have the vivid experience of life we want to have, we should free ourselves from the need for a perfectly curated answer to who am I?
Here a few of the principles I lean on for an ease-inducing relationship with identity…
Hold it loosely—it will change.
Be the architect—it’s yours to change.
Being, over doing—it’s who you are, not what you do.
As always, I’d love to hear from you 🫶 there’s always infinitely more value in collective perspectives or experiences than any one in isolation.
How has your sense of self evolved over time? How has your relationship with identity evolved? How has, or does this, play out in your world? Can’t wait to hear from you!
Have a beautiful week friends.
With love.
Jesse
“There is no complete” I love that!
Nice article mate! Love the reference to a pottery wheel, the softness being more productive than the force. So true in my own experience yet I always revert instinctually to force in the face of a challenge, a hard pattern to reprogram.