The Identity Crisis You Don’t Know You’re Having

You might think an identity crisis is a one-off event that happens as a teenager or during a mid-life crisis. It might be the quiet dread of aging: feeling young on the inside, with the mirror disagreeing on the outside, as the looming presence of death begins to haunt the edges of your mind.

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines an identity crisis as follows:

The Crisis That Never Ends

But what happens when you experience an identity crisis that you carry with you, like a wound that never heals? Or when you experience a series of micro crises? The real crisis isn’t just that one big event that happened in your past or that you’re preparing for in the future. 

Instead, what if it’s the slow erosion of who you are? Something that’s been buried under years of expectations, trauma responses, social programming, and performance-based worth. 

What if it’s the simple unwillingness to face your fears? Fear of failure, of success. Fear of never being enough or of needing to have it all together. The fear you’ll never improve—the fear of always feeling the way you do, trapped in the confinement of a false life through your unconscious creation, with no hope and no way out.

What if your crisis isn’t simply that you rebelled as a teenager or hit forty and spiraled somehow? No, what if it’s the incessant feeling that you aren’t who you really are? 

That you aren’t living the life you were meant to live because you shirked responsibility or gave in to life’s pressures, and with each new wrinkle, grey hair, or imperfection, you find yourself continually forced into this one truth: life is impermanent.

Living the Wrong Life

Innumerable people suffer the tragedy of watching life pass them by because they are too afraid to live. 

It’s a quiet suffering. 

An internal pain of knowing you chose the life you now live.

The pain of settling. 

Of not giving life everything you had because you were too afraid to take a chance. Too afraid to risk looking foolish, losing money, or disappointing someone because they had a different plan for your life. 

Rather than pursuing your dream, instead of fighting for it, you let go. You let go—not to save yourself, but to keep your ego intact—that fragile, desperate thing, begging to be seen as enough, to be heard and accepted, to blend in and keep the peace. In doing so, you betrayed your own soul, one compromise at a time. You became exactly what the world wanted: obedient, invisible, and forgettable. 

A Life That Feels False

This crisis, the quiet identity crisis of our time, is a life that looks fine but feels false.

A pretending that you have everything together to appear “normal,” whatever that is. To protect yourself from pain and discomfort. 

To feel as if you have a place in the world, even though your place is a forced acceptance of the diminished reality you’ve created for yourself. A half-smile to say you’re okay when inside, you quietly writhe, wondering what happened and where all the years went. 

The question then becomes, is this something you must live with until the day you die, a quiet coddling of suppressed emotions, or is this something you can reforge as you take your life back, standing at the cliff’s edge, screaming defiance to the wind, before diving into the turbulent waters below, fighting to renew that lost sense of self?

The truth is, most people will approach that cliff’s edge and cower. They shudder at the idea of change. Not because they don’t want to. Because it’s difficult, it’s hard. They don’t think they can. So, instead, they resolve themselves to their silent suffering.

The Hidden Roots of Identity Crisis

Your identity didn’t come about by happenstance. It was pieced together over time from fragments handed to you by others—a combination of lived experiences, thoughts, and beliefs, all created through familial and societal programming. Many were made in childhood and used as coping strategies to help you navigate life.

You were the good kid or rebel, the hero, the know-it-all, the invisible one. Each one served a purpose: to protect or make you feel seen. 

However, as a child, you don’t know who you are. You show up in the world to parents, who often don’t know who they are. They may have a sense or idea of who they are, but many are pretending just to fit into the overall construct of society. 

How many times have you heard the story of a family of doctors? The grandfather was a doctor, so the father became a doctor, passing the expectations on down the line: “My kids will become doctors too!” 

Then there’s the oddball child who won’t conform and wants to be an artist, much to the family’s chagrin. They’re cast out because their identity doesn’t match their parents’ expectations. Using the example of the doctor, the father only succumbed to the grandfather’s wishes because he lacked the courage to take a different path.

The Inherited Identity Crisis

As a parent, you want your child to have a good life; you don’t want them to suffer because their suffering becomes your own. So, you forge your child’s identity and point them in a direction you deem best.

Not out of malice, or even simple, strict control, but simply because you believe one of two thoughts: the first being that you created a good life worth passing down. The second is that you struggled through life and want that to end with you.  

This is normal. Every parent wants their children to succeed.

However, they risk skewing their child’s identity toward conformity without knowing what they’re doing.

The child, on the other hand, remains oblivious and never questions it—they can’t. They’ve never known anything else, and their cognitive abilities haven’t developed enough to sense when their identity is being shaped.

Autonomous as you believe yourself to be, look back far enough, and you will find a line of individuals, each shaping you in ways you couldn’t understand. 

And yes, a part of you needed it. You needed the strong hand of guidance because, without it, you felt lost.

When Guidance Becomes Identity

I’ve seen this in my own daughter. Intuitively, she knows what she needs to do, but she doesn’t do it. For instance, she knows what she needs to do to get good grades at school, but she won’t follow through without guidance. 

Not because she’s lazy but because she doesn’t yet understand why it matters. The connection between effort and outcome is a new concept, and she lacks a clear understanding of why working toward an outcome will ultimately benefit her. 

It’s not even about the grades. Good grades aren’t the goal. Discipline is. Showing up and doing what’s hard even when you don’t want to. That’s what matters. It’s dedication, hard work, and consistency that allow you to show up and achieve your dreams. 

Because of her limited life experience, I know she doesn’t understand this concept, so I try to show her while remaining hands-off enough that she can figure out who she is. But there is a fine line between guiding and allowing her to choose her autonomy. 

Regardless of how hard I try, I know I’m influencing her identity in a way that will affect her future. Hopefully, for good, but I know there will be wounds there, too. 

This can’t be helped. We’ve all experienced it. For some, it creates a more profound sense of meaning in life; for others, it feels like they’ve been held back. 

Regardless of whether it helped or hindered you, the result is the same: you learned to wear an identity. And over time, you didn’t just wear it, you became it. 

When the Roles You Play Become Who You Think You Are

You didn’t create an identity for yourself out of clarity; you did it to survive, to protect yourself from a world that felt too large, too unknown. It was so you could fit in. To feel safe. To matter. To overcome and prove people wrong. And that instinct didn’t end in childhood. It’s followed you your entire life—from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood—and it’s still following you. 

Think of yourself as an actor in a play; every new role comes with a mask. The job title. The spouse. The parent. The leader. The failure. The broken. One role after another, each one asking you to become someone slightly different, to conform wholeheartedly, until you forget who you were before you ever wore the masks.

Adopting these roles isn’t the problem. The identity crisis occurs when these roles become your cage. Like I said earlier:

“This crisis, the quiet identity crisis of our time, is a life that looks fine but feels false.”

The crisis comes when you stay in a job you hate, even though you know it’s eating you alive, yet you do nothing. You have bills and need to survive, so you trade your soul—not all at once, but like the quiet scream into your pillow before you don your mask and reenter the world.

However, survival becomes a trap. You cycle through mask after mask, pretending to be someone you’re not to meet expectations you never chose because you need to keep the lights on and feed your family. It’s admirable, but it’s killing you.

The Identity of Trauma

Some identities are born in trauma—created not to express who you are but to protect yourself from ever experiencing that pain again. Over time, that protective identity can become a prison because you still relate to the present as if the past never ended. The world stops making sense because the mask you wear no longer fits the life you’re trying to live.

Reliving the trauma conflicts with your reality. Your life has changed, but your emotions stay stuck in the past. So, you put on a brave face. You smile. You nod. You push through the best you can while the brokenness continues to suffocate you. All the while hoping no one notices the pain.

Embracing the Real You: The Antidote to Identity Crisis

Embracing the real you can be harder than it seems. Not because you don’t have what it takes, but because the real you may be so foreign to your current identity or mask you’re wearing that it doesn’t actually feel like you.

How can it? It’s been so distant it feels like taking on a new personality. But once you realize that the identity that isn’t serving you has to go, the peeling of the onion can begin. Be forewarned, though; you need to be prepared if you’re going to peel the onion. 

For one, there are many layers you’ll have to dig through to get to the core. Secondly, onions have a proclivity to make you cry. If you have a cut on your hand, it might sting. As you go through the process of embracing your true self, be prepared to feel a little uncomfortable. 

Don’t let this stop you from peeling the layers, though. If you want your life to change, you must be willing to get uncomfortable. It takes courage to change your life—real courage. But it’s the courage to live aligned with your true essence that is the beginning of freedom. 

As you begin to integrate your self, past, and present while looking forward to your future, you’ll start to find healing. But don’t think that life will magically get better just because you’ve done the work and found healing. 

Life becomes clearer, not necessarily easier, and that distinction needs to be made and understood. 

Suffering doesn’t end just because you change. Instead, you change yourself to a level that allows you to rise above suffering.  

Only when you can strip away what is false can you begin to build what is true.

Rebuilding Your Identity from Within

The idea that people don’t change is flawed. The truth is, you’re constantly evolving. You have to; that’s how you’ve survived this long. We are creatures capable of metamorphosis. It’s innate, which is why you’ve created all the identities in your life—not out of deception but out of necessity.

However, if you want to change proactively, rather than waiting for life to “just happen” and force change upon you, you’ll need to engage with the process directly. 

The Discipline of Stillness

The first and most essential step is to adopt a meditation practice. Learn to sit in silence and solitude to reconnect with yourself without the distractions. Change is often difficult because your mind is rarely still, and who can blame you? There’s always something or someone after your attention. Your attention is priceless, and the world knows it. That’s why it fights so hard to steal it. 

When you strip away the noise and enter the silence and solitude, that’s when you can begin to see who you really are. 

Initially, it will be a cacophony of uninterrupted thought. All the various identities running wild in your mind, just screaming for your attention—the job, the leader, the parent, the spouse, the winner, the loser—will want to come out and play. Each one will peek their head in, trying to pull your attention, desperate to feel seen and valued. 

As you sit, however, you constantly allow yourself to let go. When your mind is pulled in one direction—let it go. When another thought comes in, let it go as well. You keep letting go, again and again, until nothing remains but you. 

This takes time and discipline. It’s hard to sit still. Harder to quiet your mind. But the more you learn to let go in meditation, the more you’ll let go in life.

Question Yourself

Most people don’t ask themselves hard questions. And if they do, they rarely offer honest, thoughtful answers—the kind that require real contemplation. Why? Because your mind doesn’t know how to be still. It doesn’t know how to grow quiet enough to sit with a question and wait for an answer that might change your life. 

The question, “Who am I without my roles, without my identity?” scares most people away. If they do happen to sit with it, they end up running because when you sit with it long enough, things tend to get uncomfortable very quickly. 

Who are you without your roles? Who are you without the identity you’ve created for yourself? If you aren’t that, then who? That’s a complex problem to solve. It’s not self-evident. You have to dig. And not just for clarity—for your soul. 

And then, after you find an answer—if you ever do—what then? How do you resolve the issue? How do you incorporate that into your life? It presents a whole new level of complexity that requires more thought and work. 

You might ask, “What do I truly value?” That’s a good question, but the convenient answer comes easy—the surface-level answer. But surface answers don’t change lives or shape identity. You have to go deeper. 

For instance, if I asked what you valued and you responded with ‘peace,’ that sounds noble. But what does that mean? What does peace look like to you? Is it stillness? Is it safety? Is it control? But if you can’t define it, if it’s just a vague idea floating in the ether, how can you ever embody it? Because you don’t know what peace really is. 

Values Over Reactions

You must be willing to delve deeper. Once you’ve asked these questions and uncovered your values, the next step is to live by them—not just react out of habit. Again, this isn’t easy. It takes work. You must be vigilant, watching your mind every day, ensuring it’s aligned with the identity you’re trying to build. 

That takes time to master. But the question you need to ask yourself is, do you want to continue living the life you’ve been living, or do you want your life to change? 

This isn’t about getting a new job, house, car, or the things you think you need to elevate your life. Instead, it’s asking the question at the emotional level, the deeper psychological. What kinds of thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors will actually support the life you want to live?

When you start embodying values over reactions, something shifts. At first, it’s subtle. Almost imperceivable. It may not seem like a significant shift, but if you stay consistent, it compounds. Over time, it transforms you in ways you never thought possible. 

A snowball effect takes place, and it will pull you along if you let it. But you have to be willing to stay with the discomfort. You have to endure short-term friction to create long-term freedom.

You Are Not Who the World Told You to Be

You are more than that. The world teaches you how to be cynical, arrogant, greedy, and envious, but why shouldn’t it? The world is hard. It’s dangerous. You’re liable to take a mortal blow if you’re not wearing the correct armor. You have to be cautious, or people might take advantage of you. 

Does this mean you have to play by those rules? Must you wear the garments of cynicism and arrogance or greed to protect yourself? Of course not!

This is why Jesus instructed the crowd during the sermon on the Mount to turn the other cheek. 

The world would tell you to fight back. To give back what you got, which is why just one verse before, in Matthew 5:38, Jesus says,

The rest of the passage is all about non-resistance to an evil person.

Many take this as a form of weakness. You may feel uncomfortable reading this right now because it counters your paradigm of looking out for number one. But do not construe this as a weakness. Oh no— Living like this requires a level of discipline most people will never know. 

Here’s a simple question to help illustrate the point. Is it easier to get angry and retaliate when someone strikes you, or is it easier to stay calm and composed?

The undisciplined mind will lash out every single time. On the other hand, the disciplined mind chooses wisdom, stillness, and silence.

However, this does not mean that a disciplined mind allows people to exploit it. 

The Monk & The General

Consider this story, keeping the above idea in mind, and ask yourself: Who holds the real power?

This story is about a small village tucked in the mountains of China—a peaceful place, quiet and self-contained, with a monastery at the center. 

One day, a scout burst into the square with news that the Emporer’s army was fast approaching. The villagers, fearing for their safety, fled to the mountains—all except for one monk, who remained behind. 

When the army arrived, the General rode to the center of the village, where the monk stood calmly waiting. 

He glared down from his horse and asked, “Where are the villagers?” 

The monk said nothing. 

Irritated, the General dismounted and stood face-to-face with the monk.

“Where are all the villagers?” he asked again.

Still, the monk remained silent. 

Enraged by what he took as defiance, the General growled, “Do you know who I am? I’m the man who can cut you down with my sword—right here, where you stand.” 

The monk looked at him, steady and unshaken, and said, “Do you know who I am? I’m the man who can stand here while you cut me down.” 

The General stared at him in silence. Then mounted his horse and rode away, followed by his army. 

Strength reveals itself in different forms. Most think strength means power: the ability to resist, to strike, to conquer. But the real strength is restraint. It’s the quiet control of your emotions when the world expects an explosion. 

It’s willing yourself to stare into the dark corners of your soul, to probe the depths in search of truth, no matter how uncomfortable. Because the mask you wear is a facade, it’s not armor. It’s a prison. 

Finding Freedom

As you remove the masks, you reveal the child within—the true self. There’s a reason Jesus said in Matthew 19:14:

And also in Matthew 18:3:

Why does Jesus point to children? Because children live unmasked. They are innocent, trusting, curious—unburdened by shame or performance. As you age, that child doesn’t disappear. That younger self still lives inside you, even if buried under years of protective armor. 

But the world is complex; it’s dangerous, and because that inner child feels so vulnerable, you mask up to survive and protect it from harm. But survival isn’t freedom. To enter the kingdom of heaven right here, right now, you have to remove the masks.

Living in constant states of worry, regret, anger, and fear are far removed from heaven on earth. That’s literal hell. I know because I suffered through years of depression—constant torment day and night. And I promise you: there was no heaven to be found in that place.

But as I began to remove the masks, life got easier. Not because my circumstances changed but because I had changed. Now, the idea of heaven on earth doesn’t feel like fantasy anymore. It’s much closer than it ever has been. And the more I open myself, the more I let that child return, the freer I become. 

Don’t Wait for Tomorrow, Start Today

You can change your life today. Waiting until tomorrow will only compound regret, filling your life with should-haves and would-haves, and that’s no way to live. Because sometimes, tomorrow means another ten years. 

We think of death as the closing of the eyes and the last exhalation of the breath, but that is not the only death you experience.

Changing your identity is a kind of death. The dismantling of the ego you’ve spent years constructing. 

But staying the same? That’s another kind of death. A quieter, more insidious one. A slow suffocation. The moment you give yourself over to a life you no longer wish to live, but suffer nonetheless. That’s true death. That’s hell on earth.

In comparison, physical death might feel like a blessing. The ultimate release of all the burdens you were too afraid to let go of in life. Because if you did, what would that mean? Who are you without them? What might you become? 

But that’s the fight worth having. The only fight. It’s the one that could bring liberation to not just you but to the entire human species. 

I challenge you to remember this, return to it, and sit with it—not just today but over the next few weeks and months, during the quiet moments when you wonder who you’re becoming or could have been.

Gandhi said,

I believe this wholeheartedly with everything in me.

If this message resonates with you, please share it with someone who may find it helpful. We don’t change the world alone; we do it together.

Thank you for reading. 

I wish you the strength to become who you truly are,

Josiah

For more information and resources, visit josiahthibodeau.com