I spent a long time not knowing who I was. I don’t mean that in some dramatic, existential way. I mean that if you had sat me down at thirty and asked me what I actually wanted out of my life, separate from what I had been conditioned to want, separate from what the people around me expected, I would have struggled to give you an honest answer. I had opinions and preferences and a personality that worked well enough to get me through most rooms. But underneath all of that, there was a question I carried and rarely said out loud.
Who am I, really?
Underneath the version of me that shows up at the office, the one who knows how to hold a conversation or navigate a dinner party or respond to a text in a way that sounds like I have my life together. Underneath the version that learned years ago which opinions to share and which to keep quiet, which feelings to show and which to fold up and put away before anyone noticed them. Who is actually here?
If you have ever asked yourself that question and felt embarrassed for not having an answer, I want you to sit with what I am about to say. That confusion makes sense. It is one of the most predictable outcomes of growing up human in a world that begins shaping you before you have any say in the matter.
An author and spiritual counselor named Sven Erlandson wrote a book called There’s a Hole in My Love Cup, and one chapter in particular has stayed with me for a very long time. He describes something that I think every person who has ever felt lost in their own life will recognize. When we are young, we hold out what he calls a Love Cup. We hold it out to our parents, to our teachers, to anyone whose attention and approval might fill it. And because we are children and filling that cup feels like survival, we start paying very close attention to what works. We notice what makes a parent smile, what earns a teacher’s praise, what keeps the peace at home, what gets us included instead of ignored. And then, without anyone teaching us to do this consciously, we become that version of ourselves. We become the kid who gets the positive attention.
Erlandson calls the resulting personality an accumulation of fragments. That phrase is worth pausing on. The self that forms this way is assembled from the outside in, one adjustment at a time, shaped almost entirely by what the environment rewarded. A piece borrowed from what made mom happy, another from what kept dad calm, another from what the other kids at school seemed to respect, another from whatever made the adults in the room stop looking at you with concern. Fragment by fragment, a personality takes shape, and it can look remarkably convincing. It functions. It gets through school and into relationships and through job interviews. It can even look confident. But there is a difference between a self that was built to function and a self that was built from something true, and most of us were never given the space to notice the difference.
The fewer sources of love available to the child, Erlandson says, the more chameleon-like the personality becomes. A child with one parent who is emotionally unavailable and another who is overwhelmed will cycle through versions of themselves constantly, reading the room, shifting shape, adjusting tone and posture and mood to maximize whatever small offering of warmth might come their way. A child’s brain is designed to figure out how to stay close to the people they need in order to survive, and shape-shifting is one of the most effective ways to do that. But the cost of all that shape-shifting is that by the time the child grows up, they may not be able to locate anything underneath the performance. And the shame of that realization, when it finally comes, is enormous.
What makes this worse, and what Erlandson describes with a kind of unflinching clarity that I appreciate, is what happens when the parents themselves are carrying empty Love Cups. Because an empty cup doesn’t just fail to give. It takes. A parent who never had their own needs met will often turn to their child, unconsciously, to get those needs filled. And when I say unconsciously, I mean it. Most parents who do this would be horrified if someone pointed it out to them. They are not trying to harm their children. They are doing what was done to them, reaching for the nearest source of warmth in a life that didn’t give them enough of it, and the nearest source of warmth in most households is the child who loves them out of necessity.
Think about what this looks like from the child’s perspective. You are five or six years old and your mother has had a terrible day. You can feel it the moment she walks in the door. Something in her posture, something in the way she sets her keys down, tells you that the atmosphere in the house is about to change. And because you love her, and because her emotional state directly determines whether your evening will feel safe or unpredictable, you go to her. You ask her what’s wrong. You sit with her. You become, at five or six years old, the person who holds the emotional weight of an adult’s bad day. She feels better, and you feel important, and the whole exchange looks, from the outside, like a close and loving relationship between a mother and her child.
But something has been reversed. Erlandson is very direct about this, and I think his clarity matters here: it is never the child’s job to fill the Love Cup of the parent. It is always the parent’s job to fill the Love Cup of the child. Always. The love is supposed to flow in one direction during childhood, from parent to child, and when it starts flowing the other way, something fundamental has gone wrong. The reason most people don’t recognize this when it’s happening is that it has been going wrong for generations. The parent whose cup is empty had a parent whose cup was empty, who had a parent whose cup was empty, and at no point along the way did anyone stop and say, out loud, that the direction of this thing had been reversed. So the child doesn’t know. The child thinks this is just what love looks like, because in their family, it is.
And being needed, for a child whose cup is empty, can feel almost the same as being loved.
I want to say that again so it doesn’t get missed: being needed, for a child whose cup is empty, can feel almost the same as being loved. The child learns to read the parent’s mood before their own, to manage the parent’s anxiety before they have any language for what anxiety even is. And the child, at least when young, is generally eager to do this. Erlandson makes the point that this eagerness is real and worth taking seriously. The child loves the parent and wants to give, and so the caretaking becomes another fragment of the personality, another piece assembled from the outside in. Taking care of people becomes who they are, because it was the version of them that felt closest to connection.
Over time, this pattern becomes invisible. The child grows into an adolescent and then an adult who is drawn to people who need something from them, who feels most comfortable in relationships where they are the one giving, who experiences a strange and unsettling emptiness in situations where no one needs them to perform or provide or manage anything. They may not be able to explain why a calm evening at home with nothing to do feels more threatening than a crisis at work. They may not understand why they keep choosing partners who take more than they give, or why they feel guilty when they try to say no, or why the idea of asking for something for themselves produces a physical sensation of dread somewhere in their chest. The answer, if they could trace it all the way back, is that their personality was built around giving because giving was the closest thing to love they could find.
Erlandson also describes something he calls stealing praise, and this one cuts deep if you have ever experienced it. A child does something well, earns something on their own, accomplishes something that belongs to them, and the parent absorbs it. The parent turns the child’s achievement into evidence of their own good parenting and personal worth. The child’s success gets co-opted before the child has a chance to own it. Maybe it is a good grade, and the parent tells everyone at dinner how they stayed up helping with homework, when in fact the child did it alone. Maybe it is a talent that the child developed through their own effort, and the parent begins introducing the child to friends and family as though the talent is a reflection of the household rather than the individual. The child learns, slowly and without anyone naming it, that even the things they accomplish do not fully belong to them. Their wins are absorbed into someone else’s story. And the developmental consequence of this is significant, because a child who never gets to own their own accomplishments has a very difficult time building a sense of self that feels solid. Everything they achieve passes through them like water through a net. They can see the achievement, they can remember doing it, but it doesn’t stick to them the way it should. It doesn’t become part of who they know themselves to be.
And the message underneath all of this, whether it comes from the siphoning of love or the stealing of praise or the general atmosphere of a household where the parent’s emotional needs come first, is remarkably consistent: your needs are less important than mine. What you feel matters less than what I feel. Who you are is less relevant than who I need you to be. That message doesn’t arrive in a single conversation. It arrives in a thousand small moments over the course of years, and by the time the child is old enough to question it, the message has already become the foundation of their personality. Questioning it would mean questioning everything they have built, and most people are not ready to do that at eight or twelve or even twenty-five.
A child receiving that message does not rebel against it, at least not at first. They adapt to it, because adapting is how children survive. And the adaptation looks like a personality. It looks like helpfulness, like maturity, like emotional intelligence beyond their years. The adults around them praise it, and the child keeps going, because the Love Cup needs filling and this seems to be the only way to get close.
But Erlandson is honest about what happens when the cup stays empty long enough, and I think this is the part of his work that connects most directly to the shame of not knowing who you are. When a person has spent years, sometimes decades, filling other people’s cups while their own remains empty, something starts to turn. The eagerness that characterized childhood begins to sour. Resentment builds, often without the person understanding where it is coming from. Some people become bitter in ways that surprise them, angry at people who seem to move through the world with an ease and confidence they cannot access. Others turn to things that offer a temporary sense of fullness, substances or relationships or achievements that fill the cup for a moment before it drains again. And some begin engaging in patterns of self-destruction that look, from the outside, like poor decision-making or lack of discipline, but that are actually the predictable behavior of someone whose internal reserves have been depleted for so long that they have stopped believing the cup can be filled at all.
This is where identity confusion becomes something more than an intellectual puzzle. It becomes suffering. The person who doesn’t know who they are is also, very often, the person who doesn’t know why they keep ending up in the same painful places, why their relationships follow the same patterns, why they feel exhausted by a life that looks perfectly fine on paper. The confusion and the suffering are connected, because both come from the same root. A self was built to serve the needs of others, and now that self is running on empty, and the person inside it cannot figure out why everything feels so hollow when they have done everything they were supposed to do.
And this is when many typically end up in my office for an appointment after exhausting all other options.
I think about this in my own life more often than I would like to admit. I am fifty-two years old and there are still moments when someone asks me a straightforward question about what I want, what I prefer, what matters to me, and I feel a hesitation that has nothing to do with the complexity of the question. It is the hesitation of someone who learned very early to check the room before answering. What does this person want to hear? What version of me fits best here? That scanning process was so automatic for so long that I mistook it for thoughtfulness. I thought I was being considerate, but really I was being adaptive. Those are not the same thing, and it took me years to understand the difference.
This is what identity confusion actually looks like in adulthood. Most of the time it is undramatic, barely noticeable, showing up in the ordinary moments where a person is expected to know their own mind and quietly discovers that they don’t. You stand in front of a menu and cannot decide what you want to eat because you have spent so many years eating what other people ordered that your own preferences feel faint and unreliable. You get asked in a job interview what you are passionate about and the answer you give sounds polished but borrowed, like something you read on someone else’s resume. You end a relationship and within weeks find yourself wondering whether you are sad because you lost something real or because you lost the version of yourself that relationship allowed you to be. The confusion is constant and low-grade and most people learn to work around it so well that they stop noticing it is there.
And then there is the world we are living in right now, which does not make any of this easier. We carry a device in our pockets that shows us a thousand versions of who we should be before we have finished our morning coffee. Someone out there is more disciplined than you, someone else is more creative, and someone else has figured out a morning routine or a parenting philosophy or a spiritual practice that makes them look like they know exactly who they are and what they are doing. And you are watching all of it from behind a screen with the nagging suspicion that you missed a step somewhere. Social media didn’t invent identity confusion, it just gave it a megaphone. The question “who am I?” becomes almost unbearable when you are surrounded by people who appear to have already answered it for themselves.
But here is what I want to name clearly, because I think it gets lost in the shame. The confusion itself makes sense. If you go back to that child holding out a Love Cup, adjusting and shifting and becoming whoever the room needed them to be, and then you follow that child through school and adolescence and young adulthood where the adjustments only multiplied, where the fragments kept accumulating, it would be strange if that person arrived at midlife with a clear and settled sense of who they are. The confusion is evidence that the process worked. You adapted and survived and became functional. And the cost of all that functionality is that the question of who you actually are underneath it may have never been given serious attention, by you or by anyone around you.
I want to be careful here because I am not suggesting that every person walking around is in some kind of identity crisis. Many people live full and meaningful lives without ever stopping to ask these questions, and I do not think that makes them naive or avoidant. But I do think there is a particular kind of suffering that belongs to the person who senses something is missing and cannot name it. The person who has done everything they were supposed to do and still feels like they are living at a slight distance from their own life. That distance is the gap between the accumulated self and whatever was there before the accumulation started. And the shame attached to it often keeps people from ever mentioning it, because how do you explain to someone that you have been alive for thirty or forty or fifty years and you are still not sure who you are?
You don’t, usually. Most people keep it to themselves, compensate, build more structure around the question so that it stays buried under productivity and routine and responsibility. And if it surfaces anyway, in a quiet room or during a long drive or in the middle of the night when the distractions are gone, you push it back down and tell yourself that everyone probably feels this way sometimes and it probably doesn’t mean anything.
It means something.
It means that the self you built was built for a reason, and the reason was love, and the love was real, and the cost was also real. Somewhere along the way you traded access to yourself for access to collecting scraps of love, and at the time that trade made sense because connecting to your caregivers meant survival. The shame you carry for not knowing who you are is actually misplaced, because the not-knowing makes perfect sense. When you spend a childhood becoming whoever your parents or caregivers needed you to be, the not-knowing is what follows.
I am not going to wrap this up neatly. I don’t think it deserves to be wrapped up neatly. If you have read this far and something in you is uncomfortable, I would ask you to stay with that for a while rather than pushing it back down. The discomfort is information. It is telling you that something in here landed, and the thing that landed might be closer to the truth than anything the accumulated self has been willing to look at.
But I will say this. In all the years I have sat with people who are wrestling with this kind of confusion, and in my own experience of wrestling with it myself, I have noticed something that I think is worth paying attention to. Even in the people who are most lost, even in the people who have spent the longest time performing a version of themselves that was built for someone else’s benefit, there is almost always something underneath it all that never fully went away. Some small, persistent thing that keeps pulling at them, keeps refusing to be satisfied by the performance, keeps asking the question even when they have done everything in their power to stop asking it. I don’t know exactly what to call it yet. But I think it deserves a closer look, and I think that is where we will go next week.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: The Part of You That Never Quite Went Quiet
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
