We talk about identity so much that the word has stopped meaning anything.
Who are you? How do you find out? What is authentic?
To make it harder, if you were a kid who just didn’t fit… the one who sat at the edge of the joke you didn’t comprehend… you can spend the rest of your life doing a kind of math.
Figuring out the midpoint between what other people want and whatever you actually are. Your identity is sort of a weird compromise. So you aren’t ever exactly what other people want and you aren’t anything natural to you either.
That might be the greatest trap of all.
Not any single bad decision, just the long arithmetic of trying to figure it out.
The most useful thing I know about building an identity is that it has to leave room for other people.
Most identity culture does the opposite. It sells you a new avatar and calls it a self.
Here is what I mean.
People get mildly successful doing things they don’t resonate with. A dating tactic, a relational construct, something that wasn’t their idea of a life when they first tried it, but it kind of worked.
They met someone through it. They made some money. That felt like success. It was success, in the narrow sense.
But success in a container you can’t hold long term creates a kind of split.
You did well with a method. The method got you somewhere.
And underneath that is a separate question: does it bring you the kind of life you actually want, or does it just narrow you, niche you down, and leave you inside a hustle you now have to keep feeding. Things you don’t want to do feel like a hustle.
Eventually you tear the whole thing down and start over, instead of carrying something forward. Your life feels like a series of stall outs.
I think the most authentic version of a person is also the most relatable one.
Not despite being specific. Because of it. People can disagree with you and still recognize you. You don’t read as hard of a threat when you really are “located” in what you look like externally and internally.
That’s kind of who she is, they think. That’s been true of her a long time.
Authenticity doesn’t provoke the way a borrowed opinion does.
In my own life, the more I moved toward a set of values that actually felt like mine (so hard to do in the red-flag age), built from every version of myself I’d already been, the less friction I got back. People didn’t need to agree. My partner didn’t even need to always agree.
They just stopped being confused.
Giving up the thing that kind of works is hard, because it works. Because you don’t have a back up. Because it forces a liminal space. People tend to avoid those in-between spaces.
Following what’s right for other people gives you less resistance than the truth does, at first. Prescribed methods work, if they don’t you can blame the person that gave them to you. Our lives are full of therapy frameworks and business models that keep us out of that dark hallway to ourselves.
For years I used Meta for my coaching business and felt awful about it the entire time. I’d quit for six months, come back, try to make reels in a way that didn’t feel like a performance. I hired an assistant to do it for me.
It never worked.
I got a reel to a million views a few times and still didn’t want to be the person who made it. There was a simpler tell underneath all of it: I wouldn’t buy something like what I sell from someone popular on Instagram. So why did I think anyone would buy from me that way? Why had I convinced myself that I had to become famous on a platform that I believe is fundamentally dangerous and addictive?
Recently I took it all down.
The Facebook page, the Instagram account with the followers I’d built up over years. Deleted a body of work. What’s left is Medium, this Substack, and a YouTube account that gets fed video interviews from time to time.
I felt so relieved when I did it. I felt empowered to make a lot of other changes in both businesses at the same time. I wondered what had held me back so long? Why had I put so much energy into methods that were draining and probably bringing in the wrong type of clients?
I think because I know not being on Meta means fewer people will see any of this. That was the trade. In dating that meant shifting from being appealing to almost all men, to being just right for only one.
I know this shift so well by now.
Somewhere there’s still a version of me, awkward, fifteen years old, at the edge of the joke I don’t understand, doing the math on what everyone else wants. She’s not going anywhere.
I just stopped asking her for the answers.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.