How building something changes your identity

Over the past year or so, I have been taking some concrete steps towards building my identity. What I mean by this is that when it comes to my professional life, I spent a long time not really knowing what I wanted, but I did figure out that I am someone who needs to find meaning and purpose in what I put out into the world, but defining how I do that, and how it aligns to who I actually am, has not come easy.

What really made it click for me was when I stopped seeing my creative projects as things I do on the side when I have time and started seeing them as things that are genuinely mine. That shift helped me understand more about who I am, what I want, and how I am going to get there than almost anything I had done before.

What The Shift Actually Feels Like

For a long time, like a lot of people, my sense of identity was largely constructed around external factors, with a big one being my job, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with that, it meant that when work felt draining or misaligned, there was not much else to hold onto.

Building something of your own changes that. It is not something you can do overnight, and it does not happen without some discomfort, but when you give yourself permission to gradually build something that belongs to you, you start to notice that you have an interior life that is entirely yours. The ideas you come up with, your creative output, the growing sense of what you are capable of, it all begins to solidify into something that feels like a system you can rely on. Something that exists entirely outside of someone else's structure and someone else's definition of your value.

There is a kind of confidence that develops within you from making something from nothing, well, from just an idea. Even when it is imperfect, and even when nobody is watching yet, being able to say to yourself "I did that, I made that exist where it did not exist before" does absolute wonders for the soul, or in this blog post's case, your identity.

Why It Is Uncomfortable As Well As Exciting

It would be remiss of me not to mention that identity shifts, even the ones you want, are disorientating. You feel like you are becoming someone different while still having a foot in who you were, and if I am honest, the comfort of staying where you were can feel quite tempting sometimes. Stepping into the unknown is strange and uncomfortable, and the imposter syndrome is… something.

Imposter syndrome will get you thinking all kinds of things. Who am I to be writing this, building this, coaching people through this? I still feel it sometimes, and I think most people who are building something feel it too. But what I have found helpful is to reframe it slightly; it is less a sign that you should not be doing what you are doing, and more a sign that what you are doing actually matters to you. When we really care about something, we tend to become quite vulnerable around it; the two things go together.

Alongside that vulnerability, there is also the tension of two versions of yourself trying to co-exist at once. The person you are in the context of your day-to-day life and the person you are becoming in the context of what you are building. They do not always feel like the same person, and learning to hold both without one cancelling out the other is its own kind of, let's be honest, stressful work.

What It Means For Becoming

And yet, this tension, this discomfort, this disorientating in-between feeling, this is what becoming actually looks like from the inside.

It is not a destination you arrive at and then kick back and enjoy having made it, it is a process you are always in the middle of. The things you build leave evidence of who you are becoming, your blog, your videos, your art, your creative output in whatever form it takes. All of it is proof of a self that is in the process of being made.

The identity shift is not something that happens to you; it is something you participate in through consistent small acts of creation. Every post written, every piece of art made, every conversation you have about what you are working on, these are all small votes for the person you are becoming, and over time, those votes add up into someone recognisably different from where you started.

If you have been building something and you have noticed something shifting in how you see yourself, I want to tell you that what you are feeling is very real, and the chances are, if you share it, you will find so many more people experiencing the same thing.

A Question To Sit With

Who were you before you started building this? And who are you becoming?

You do not have to have a fully formed answer yet. The process is ongoing; that is the whole point of it, but if you want to share your answer in the comments, I would genuinely love to hear it.

And if you would like someone to help you make sense of the shift you are in the middle of, that is exactly the kind of work I do, so feel free to get in touch.