When “Who Am I?” Stops Working: Identity, Loss, and Presence

What happens when the question “Who am I?” quietly turns into a trap - one that keeps us analyzing life instead of inhabiting it?

In this episode, I explore how identity often forms around loss, labels, and roles, and how even sincere attempts to understand ourselves can postpone presence. Drawing reflections from novels such as Where the Crawdads Sing, The Forgotten Garden, Spare, and Remarkably Bright Creatures, we look at identity shaped by absence: by what’s been lost, imposed, deferred, or never fully supported to grow.

I share personal reflections on grief, childhood labels that echo into adulthood, and the subtle habit of translating lived experience into meaning before it has time to settle. We also touch on how spiritual seeking can mirror the same pattern - replacing family history with past lives or cosmic origin stories - when the underlying promise remains, “I’ll arrive once I know enough.”

Rather than abandoning curiosity, this episode invites a gentler pivot: from Who am I? to Am I here? When presence comes first, identity loosens its grip and becomes something lived rather than solved.

Listen, breathe, and notice what remains when the stories set down their weight.

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Transcript

Letting Go Of Definitions

The Marshmallow Structure Metaphor

Winter Reading And Rest

Identity As Load-Bearing Stories

How Novels Reflect Identity And Loss

Assigned Identities And Self-Inhabiting

Searching Lineage For Answers

Role, Grief, And Excess Identity

Loss As Permission To Disengage

When Identity Delays Presence

Personal Loss Shaping A Life

Plans Derailed And Self-Story

Revisiting Grief To Reenter Presence

Childhood Labels And Borrowed Selves

Care With Words Around Children

Peeling Off Others’ Stories

Spiritual Explanations As New Identities

A Gentler Question: Am I Here

Performing Versus Inhabiting Moments

Translating Life Instead Of Living It

Identity Revealed Through Presence

Unbinding Worth From Titles

Descriptions Over Declarations

Holding The Question Lightly

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Lately, I have been sitting with this question that keeps returning, not urgently, like I need to answer it, but just something that is present in my field. The question of who am I? And that is a question that many of us meet at the edge of spiritual awakening or grief or loss or transition. And for a long time I thought the work was to answer it, to find the right words or the right framing or the right story to help this existence and this life make sense. But what I'm noticing now is something different. That sometimes the effort to define ourselves or even to understand ourselves is what actually keeps us from inhabiting ourselves. So this episode isn't about arriving at an identity. It is about what happens when we loosen the grip of the question itself. Last week I shared about the marshmallow game where you use toothpicks and tiny marshmallows and try to build a vertical structure. And I explained that I was kind of seeing that each of these toothpicks, that we build a very wide stable base as our beliefs and our ideas and our stories that help us hold our structure. And as I was putting down my dreams and this future casting of myself into this role that I have seen for so many years, this future version of myself, as I started laying that down, I started saying, okay, when when I have laid all of that down, what's left? What is left? I have healed through so much of my past and what got me this far, that those toothpicks had been released. But when I let go of the future, what is left for me? And I started realizing how much of our identity are the stories that are load-bearing. I have been reading a lot lately because I am finding true rest when I have when I have no destination to get to. The rest has been genuine. And also I live now in the the frozen tundra of Charlotte. And my my southern soul does not know how to cope with this cold weather. And so I am hibernating until spring, which has allowed me hours upon hours of delicious reading. And I'm not mad about that. But it was very curious that all of these books were were running through this thread, this undercurrent of identity. Now it could be that I read these books a year from now and would find an undercurrent of something totally different. But perhaps because that has been kind of what I have been focused on, it is what I read in these novels. So because I love you and you are not here for book report, I won't tell you everything. And also, I'm not going to tell you everything about these books because they are very worthy reads. So pick yourself up a copy. But I do want to just show how our identity forms in these books, specifically how it forms around loss. In Where the Crawdad Sing, the main character is given an identity that she never chose. She is the Marsh Girl, and it is imposed and it's isolating and it's even cruel. And yet she becomes deeply herself by not correcting the story that is told about her, but by inhabiting her own rhythm and her own connection with the land and her own intelligence and even her own solitude. And I read The Forgotten Garden, and it's very different. The opposite happens. When the truth of lineage is revealed, the main character begins searching backward for an answer of who she is, as if somewhere else in the past holds the missing piece that she wasn't herself because there was something unknown. So presence gets postponed while explanation is pursued. Who am I? Someone else must tell me. In spare by Prince Harry. Look at the variety, y'all. His identity is not missing at all. It is excessive. It is assigned, pre-written, and it is defined not only by who he is, but by who he is not, the heir. Identity is formed around the loss of his mother that was never truly grieved, and through role rather than presence. And in Remarkably Bright Creatures, we see yet another response where loss becomes an excuse to remain uninhabited. It is your ticket out of trying. Life is entered half-heartedly, and identity never really takes root. So all of those books have different stories and the same undercurrent that is identity shaped by what was lost, by what was missing, by what was assigned, by what never had the space to grow. Of course, identity forms around loss. Of course it does. Loss explains and loss organizes, and loss gives coherence when something fractures. But at some point, often without realizing it, identity can become something we cling to or something we keep searching for instead of something we live. We begin believing. Once I understand my story, then I'll be here. Then I'll know who I am. Or once I name who I am, then I can settle. Or I'll make sense of what has happened and then I'll arrive. And quietly through all of these, presence gets delayed. So I got to spend my free time both walking their experience and then witnessing myself in each of these stories, these patterns that have shown up in my own life, and allowing my mother's death to shape me not just in the moment and in the in the surrounding months and years that followed, but shaped me ongoing. The girl who lost her mom. That was before I was the girl who got divorced early. I saw myself in both Harry's story with a competitive older brother and in Remarkably Bright Creatures, where someone doesn't show up fully because they just don't have a grip on who they are. When my mother got sick, I was supposed to be going to school in Georgia. And I ended up, my sister, I was gonna go live with her in Georgia and go to fashion design school. Now, if you know me now, you might think that's hysterical because I live in sweatsuits and leggings, but that's okay. That's what I was gonna do. I was going to go to Georgia to fashion design school, and my mother got sick with a terminal cancer diagnosis, and my sister, who I was gonna go and live with in Atlanta, moved home to be with my mother. And I needed to stay and be home with my mother, but also that was the end of that. I could not afford after my mother passed away, and my sister was not in Georgia, I could not afford to go and live in Georgia by myself. So that went off the rocker. And I ended up just driving to UNCC, which was down the road 25 minutes and applying there and just starting school there. But I was the victim of my circumstance for far longer than I was actually the victim of circumstance. I allowed that situation to be the reason that I didn't show up fully anywhere because my plans were thrown off track. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. And I ended up living this discompobulated life for way too long. Way too long. Because I didn't have the bandwidth to grieve what I was going through, not only grieving the loss of my mother, but the loss of my plan and how I have revisited that grief recently when I'm putting down what I had planned for in my future, just to say, okay, I'm open to playing a different hand, to seeing where living in the present takes me. I didn't have the tools for that then. It was more like I'm gonna get drunk and hang out with these people and see where tomorrow takes me. I guess that was more of my plan at the time. But I just began witnessing myself through these stories and seeing how loss, all different types can shape us. Something I noticed is how much of our identity exploration begins in childhood with our parents, with what fractured or shaped us early in this lifetime. I remember going to a Hay House convention and watching Jim Quick, or I guess listening to Jim Quick give a presentation, and he is brilliant. He is fantastic. He had an accident when he was a child. He had a brain injury, and he overheard a teacher say, Oh, he's the boy with a broken brain. And after that, he he couldn't progress. He took that identity, he knew himself to be broken, to not be able to learn. And that was his identity through his school career. It turns out that his brain was not broken. He ended up learning to learn and then teaching others how to learn to learn. He teaches people how to read quickly and to learn better, and he's quite a brilliant man. But for a long time, he had the identity that someone gave him, that somebody put on him and he claimed as his own because he's a child, and that's what children do. But he was the boy with a broken brain, and that happens a lot. You hear your parents talking to teachers or teachers talking to each other, or maybe what your peers are saying about what you're good at, what you're not good at. It makes me so careful and cautious to say anything to my children about anything because I don't want them to perceive who they are through my lens. I remember my sister has told me one of my nephews is super smart. I remember being at a wedding, and I think he was five years old, sitting at the table the whole time reading Harry Potter. I'm gonna fluff up parts of the story a little bit. We'll give it a part fiction rating because some of this is incorrect, but the gist of it is correct. When they were talking about sports, and he is also a very good athlete, my dad said something like, Oh, I just thought he was into the books, you know, that kind of thing. And this is when he was much older. But you hear things like that and you think, okay, I'm not athletic because I'm smart. Kids perceive these, kids hear these things and they take them on. And so half of our healing journey, when we start saying, Who am I? It is starting to find, oh, wait a second, that's not me. That's what my grandmother said. Oh, wait a second, that's not me. That's what my teacher said. It is finding all of these stories that we have heard about ourselves and saying, like, wait a second, that's not me. Through spiritual awakening, how some of that identity exploration begins. And then we start asking about past lives and soul origins and lineage beyond this body. And I know that was true for me. That somewhere along the way, I started to believe that if I could just gather enough information of where I had come from, because y'all know you don't feel like you're from this earth, you know you don't. You know you don't. But if I figured out what I carried and where I'm from, what is my soul origin, that I would finally understand who I am. And there is nothing wrong with curiosity, it often comes from sincerity. I was still asking, who am I, just in different cosmic spiritual language, and presence was still waiting. It was still, I will know when I find out this information. Because spiritual explanations, as beautiful and wonderful and expansive as they can be, are still explanations, they are still stories, they are still something to reach for instead of inhabiting yourself. So the questions shifted from who have I been to who am I meant to be? And all of those for me ended up feeling heavy, laden with expectation and no longer curious, but demanding. Like they require resolution. And what I know now is it doesn't, they don't. So instead, I have decided on a gentler question. Am I here? Am I inhabiting this body? Am I breathing this breath? Am I present in this moment? Or am I narrating it? Those questions don't ask for identity, they ask for occupancy. I started to notice how often defining myself pulled me out of my body, and even seeking coherence pulled me into a story. Explaining myself pulled me out of presence. I've shared a lot less on TikTok and Instagram lately because I have been working on this. What I found was as I was experiencing aha moments or insights or even direct guidance, I was writing the script of how I can share this with other people. But what that did was allow me to never be fully present. Y'all, I cringe at people that seem to set up tripods to film their every moves. There are no workouts that go unrecorded. There's no moments that seem like they should be private that are not put out there. And that is great for content creators. It is necessary even. But I know that they are not truly present in that moment. It is staged to be captured, not embodied. But I was doing the same thing, not with my camera, but with my mind. I started thinking about translators, wondering if they ever really fully comprehended what was being said, or if they were so busy in the transaction of words from one language to another that the meaning never took root. That's what I felt like I was doing is going so fast to, oh, okay, this is brilliant. How would I say this instead instead of actually being present in the moment? Identity isn't wrong. There is nothing wrong with writing or teaching or sharing or a freaking video in your whole life and sharing it. There's no problem with that. But for me, it had quietly become a substitute for being here now. What I've realized is identity isn't something to solve. It is something that naturally expresses itself once we are present. What if identity isn't found in your lineage or your loss or your role, but it is revealed through inhabitation? This body, this breath, this moment. Not as declaration. When we think of it that way, from there, identity can stay descriptive and flexible and contextual, not something that you have to grip onto that has to be load-bearing. I challenge myself after removing those toothpicks of the future to sit with this question: who am I? Who am I if it is not in relation to who I become? Who am I if I unbind worth or value from impact? Who am I when I have laid everything else down? Who am I when it is not a person who is validated externally? And what I ended up with was a list of adjectives and descriptions, but not titles. I am someone who enjoys spending time with my family, who loves traveling the world. I am someone who likes to write. But I know as someone who wrote poetry for years, that will never see the light of day that loving to write doesn't require readers. The same way I am funny, but not a comedian. A comedian needs an audience. I just need my little boy. I say this not because everybody needs to lay their titles down, but because I am on a weaving mind, and this is my podcast, so I'm sharing my bath. My identity was shaped around those stories, and many were inherited, and many were crafted out of longing, and they were providing a structure that I am ready to release. I don't think the question, who am I, is wrong. I just don't think it deserves center stage. And I know many of us can go through that phase or inquiry and circle and spiral back to it again and again. But sometimes the most honest is when you find yourself there just to ask, can I let myself be here without resolving myself? We can still be curious, we can still witness the past, we can still walk forward, but our arrival no longer lives outside of us. It lives here. So that's my story and sticking to it. I have taken off some toothpicks. And if you two are asking this question again and again, just hold it lightly in your hand, allow it to be curious, or put it down and just ask yourself Am I here? It's all that's asked for you to be present in this moment and know that that's enough.