Who Are We Becoming?

Identity, Labels, and the Stories We Live By

We spend our whole lives figuring out who we are. Not just once, not just during adolescence, but repeatedly—through relationships, through loss, through who or what we love. Through what we fear. Identity is like a living thing. It shifts, grows, breaks, and reforms. Still, we often mistakenly treat it like something that should be simple and fixed: “This is just who I am.”

It’s appealing to think identity works that way. A label can feel like clarity. It can offer language for experiences that were once confusing or isolating. It can help us find community. When we finally one that fits, it can feel like finding home.

But a label can also become something we cling to too tightly.

When a label goes from describing us or our experience to defining us, something changes. We might stop simply being ourselves and begin to associate or perform as we think we’re supposed to.

There’s a difference between:

1. I have this experience and
2. This experience is the core of who I am.

The first allows movement.

The second can trap us.

This can happen with any identifier:

• Introvert
• Creative
• Married
• Single
• Christian
• Academic
• Parent
• Gay 
• Same-Sex Attracted (SSA)
• Or even being part of a specific friend group or culture

The label itself isn’t the problem. The problem is over-identification when the label becomes the entire story.

When Identity Becomes a Container Too Small

Some people discover, admit to themselves, or realize they’re SSA and find great relief in naming it. The label helps them understand something real. But sometimes, without noticing, the label begins to narrow their world:

• Only having friends who share the same experience
• Only consuming media that reflects that identity
• Only feeling understood by others who fit the same category

It can become a bubble.  A soft place at first, but eventually a boundary or even a prison.

When any identity becomes the only lens through which we see ourselves or the world, life gets small. Not intimate, but small. We are never just one thing.  We are layered. We are complicated (in a good way). We are unfinished.

Identity is a journey, not a destination. It’s absolutely okay to use words that help us understand ourselves. It’s okay to seek belonging where we feel seen.  But we are not meant to be defined entirely by one thread of our full existence.   

The truest parts of us are revealed over time in the choices we make, in how we show up, what we choose to nurture, and what we choose to release. Identity is not just something to discover but something we shape.  Over and over and over again. 

The question is not simply: Who am I?

But also: What am I becoming?

A Full Life is Bigger Than Any Label

We can hold our identities with open hands:

• Grateful for what they help us understand
• Honest about the ways they have and continue to shape us
• Careful not to let them be the whole story

Because the whole story is always bigger.

We are not static characters in a finished novel.

We are ongoing drafts— crossed out, revised, and moving forward.

Identity isn’t something we decide once. It’s who we become. One choice at a time.

Originally published on FaceBook by Brothers Road