For a long time, I don’t think I really knew who I was.
As a kid, so much of my life was shaped by chaos, instability, and things I didn’t want other people to know about.
By the time I became a teenager, I had gotten really good at becoming whatever version of myself I thought people would accept.
Funny.
Charismatic.
Confident.
Easy to like.
I watched videos about how to be more charismatic and how to get people to like me.
I chased relationships because being alone meant having to sit with myself.
I flirted.
People-pleased.
Changed depending on who I was around.
And underneath all of it was insecurity.
Because somewhere inside me was this fear:
If people don’t like me, eventually they’ll leave.
So I worked hard to make sure they liked me.
When your identity belongs to everybody else
People-pleasing seems harmless at first.
You keep everyone happy.
Avoid conflict.
Become what people need.
Say what keeps the peace.
But eventually you can create so many different versions of yourself that you don’t know which one is real anymore.
That happened to me.
I hid things.
I lied about things.
I hid pain.
I tried being whatever version of myself would keep everything together.
And I think of it now like filling a balloon.
You can keep adding pressure.
Keep hiding.
Keep performing.
Keep trying to make everyone happy.
Until eventually it bursts.
Mine did.
What happens when everything holding you up disappears?
I hit a season of my life where a lot of what I had been depending on disappeared.
Relationships changed.
Friendships disappeared.
My community changed.
The approval I had spent years chasing wasn’t there anymore.
And suddenly I had to face something I had avoided for most of my life:
Who am I when nobody else is telling me who to be?
That was terrifying.
Because I realized I didn’t really know.
I had gotten so good at surviving, adapting, and being liked that underneath all of those layers, there wasn’t a strong sense of identity.
And now there was nowhere left to hide from myself.
I had a reason to get back up
One thing was different this time.
I was a father.
And whatever else was happening in my life, I knew what kind of father I refused to become.
I wasn’t going to disappear.
I wasn’t going to become abusive.
I wasn’t going to physically be there while being completely checked out emotionally.
I knew what those versions of fatherhood felt like.
And I refused to hand the same experience to the next generation.
So I had to start climbing.
Slowly.
Sometimes painfully.
Facing things I had spent years hiding from.
Learning who I was.
Learning what I believed.
Learning what kind of man I wanted to become.
Not because everything suddenly became easy.
Because somebody was depending on me to keep going.
Anything you build your entire identity on can be taken away
This is something I still have to remind myself of.
If your entire identity is your career, what happens if you lose the job?
If it’s money, what happens when the money disappears?
If it’s your appearance, what happens when age or illness changes your body?
If it’s a relationship, what happens if that relationship ends?
If it’s people’s approval, what happens when they reject you?
There’s a saying I’ve always connected with:
If you live for people’s acceptance, their rejection can destroy you.
That was my life for years.
I was giving other people the authority to decide how valuable I felt.
And eventually I realized that is an impossible way to live.
People change.
Circumstances change.
Jobs change.
Bodies change.
Relationships change.
Your foundation has to go deeper than something temporary.
This is where God changed identity for me
This is where Faith and Identity connect.
I believe my identity ultimately has to come from the One who created me.
Not from the worst thing that happened to me.
Not from the worst thing I have ever done.
Not from somebody else’s opinion.
Not from my job.
Not from whether people approve of me.
Through Jesus, I believe forgiveness is real.
Scripture describes God as removing our sin from us and remembering it against us no more.
That is difficult for us to understand because human beings remember.
We remember what somebody did to us.
We remember what we did wrong.
We remember the failures.
Sometimes we replay them for years.
But grace says that your worst moment doesn’t have to remain your identity forever.
God sees more than the broken version of you
You might look at yourself and see a screw-up.
An addict.
A failure.
The kid nobody wanted.
The guy who ruined something.
The man who keeps falling back into the same pattern.
I believe God sees something deeper.
His child.
Someone made in His image.
Someone worth restoring.
Someone whose story is not finished.
That doesn’t erase responsibility for what we’ve done.
Healing doesn’t mean pretending we never hurt people.
Grace doesn’t mean our choices don’t matter.
It means failure does not have to become your permanent name.
Restoration is what Unashamed Journey is about
This is one of the biggest reasons Unashamed Journey exists.
Restoration.
Your past matters.
It shaped you.
It may explain parts of you.
But it does not have to permanently define you.
You can have scars without still having an open wound.
There are things in my story today that I can talk about that once felt impossible to face.
The scars still tell the story.
But they don’t control me the way they once did.
And to me, that is what healing starts looking like.
Not erasing what happened.
Becoming somebody who can carry the story without being crushed by it.
The scars tell the story. The healing shows what’s possible.
You don’t have to perform your way into a new identity
This connects to what I believe about Jesus.
You don’t have to prove yourself worthy first.
You don’t have to become religious enough.
You don’t have to pretend you’ve cleaned everything up.
You can come to God honestly and say:
I have tried building my life on everything else, and it isn’t working. I can’t fix all of this on my own. I need You to restore what I haven’t been able to restore myself.
There is no performance in that.
There is surrender.
And for me, that is where something different begins.
Confidence feels different when you stop performing
I used to want confidence because I wanted people to like me.
Now I think real confidence looks different.
It isn’t walking into every room believing you’re better than everybody.
It’s being able to walk into the room without needing everybody to approve of you.
It’s being okay with who you are while still admitting there are things you need to work on.
Today, I can look at the man in the mirror and genuinely say I like who I’m becoming.
There are flaws.
There is still work to do.
But I’m no longer desperately trying to escape myself.
That took years.
And it was worth it.
A simple place to begin
Ask yourself:
If I lost my job tomorrow, who would I be?
If somebody stopped approving of me, would I still know my value?
What parts of my personality are actually me, and what parts were built to make people accept me?
What am I still using to prove that I’m enough?
Then choose one character trait that has nothing to do with achievement.
Patient.
Honest.
Present.
Courageous.
Dependable.
Humble.
Disciplined.
And ask:
What would this look like in my life today?
Then practice it.
Because identity eventually has to become behaviour.
What rebuilding identity means to me
I spent years becoming what I thought other people wanted.
Eventually life stripped enough away that I had to figure out who I actually was.
And I’ve learned that I cannot safely build my identity on people, possessions, appearance, achievement, or a career.
All of those things can change.
My foundation has to go deeper.
For me, it goes back to God.
I believe I am loved before I perform.
Forgiven without pretending I never failed.
Restored without pretending I was never broken.
And still being shaped into the man I’m supposed to become.
Your past may explain you.
It does not get to own you.
Your scars may always be part of your story.
They don’t have to remain your identity.
You are still becoming.
Become the man you needed.