When you don’t know who you are, the world rushes in to give you a role — not to help you grow, but to make you predictable. In practice this means you adopt identities that seem empowering (the achiever, the healer, the rebel, the minimalist, the good parent, the intellectual, the spiritual one) but these roles quietly shape your preferences, your emotions, your worldview, and even your relationships more than your actual inner truth does. The more you attach to a role, the less freedom you have to evolve beyond it — you become loyal to the identity even when it no longer fits. Men tend to hide inside functional roles (“provider,” “expert,” “stoic”), while women hide inside relational roles (“nurturer,” “independent woman,” “caretaker”), but both lose access to the deeper, more fluid self beneath them. The blade cuts deepest when you realize you didn’t build your identity — you assembled it from borrowed masks that were handed to you long before you ever met yourself.