Who am I?

There is a particular kind of happiness in looking around your life and recognising yourself in it.

Not the version of yourself you think you are supposed to be. Not the person you imagined you would become ten or twenty years ago. Not even necessarily the person other people see­—just you.

I think we underestimate how much of our lives can be built around things we didn’t really choose.

The clothes we wear because they are considered flattering, the furniture we buy because it looks right, the job we think we should want, the places we go because everyone else seems to love them, the hobbies we pick up because they make us feel like the sort of person we’d like to be.

None of this is particularly dramatic. That’s probably why it is so easy to miss. You can build a perfectly pleasant life out of other people’s ideals. And for a while, you might even be quite happy in it, until something changes.

Maybe you move house, or change jobs, or maybe you become a parent or even lose someone you loved. Or maybe you simply get older and realise that the things you used to care about don’t have quite the same hold on you anymore.

Or perhaps nothing happens at all, you simply wake up one morning and realise that you have been maintaining a version of yourself that has already moved on or was never yours to begin with.

I’ve had moments like that with surprisingly small things, like a piece of clothing that used to feel completely “me” and suddenly doesn’t. We all feel it. A room in the house that we decorated years ago starts feeling like a set from somebody else’s life, things we were once desperate to have but no longer interest us. Even certain routines can become strange little relics of who we used to be.

And there’s something unsettling about that because we tend (or need) to think of identity as something fairly solid.

This is what I like, this is who I am, this is my taste.

But everything shifts, everything changes. Perhaps taste is less like a definition and more like a diary that changes as we do.

And perhaps one of the reasons it can be so difficult to work out what we actually want is that we have been taught to want more for most of our lives.

From Hollywood movies to advertising, magazines, television, social media and, more recently, influencers, they have given us an endless stream of images of beautiful homes, beautiful bodies, expensive holidays, perfect relationships, successful careers and lives that always seem to be one step ahead of ours.

We don’t necessarily sit down and decide that this is the life we want. It happens much more quietly than that. We see it, again and again, until it starts to feel normal. Until the extraordinary becomes the unreachable baseline against which we measure our own lives.

Psychology has a name for part of what happens here: upward social comparison.

When we repeatedly compare ourselves with people who appear to have more, look better or do better, the gap between their carefully presented lives and our very ordinary ones can start to feel like a personal failure.

Research has linked this kind of comparison with envy, lower self-esteem, anxiety, depressive symptoms, body dissatisfaction and reduced wellbeing. And the particularly insidious thing about social media is that we are comparing our entire, messy, unedited existence with somebody else’s edited highlights.

We forget that we are not looking at reality; we are looking at a selection of it. A photograph, a sponsored post, a holiday, a new car, a perfect kitchen, a carefully constructed persona. We see the result, not the debt, the insecurity, the failed relationships, the ordinary Tuesday afternoons or the ten photographs that were discarded before that perfect one was posted.

Yet our brains don’t always make that distinction. After enough exposure, these images can quietly become standards. We start believing that we need a bigger house, a better body, better teeth, fewer wrinkles, more money, a more exciting career, more experiences, more of everything…

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question we can ask ourselves is: how much of what I want actually came from me?

The Matrix Is Closer Than You Think

There are people who are convinced that we are living in a simulation.

The idea has been around in philosophy for a long time and became particularly popular in its modern form with the so-called simulation argument, which asks whether our reality could itself be an artificial simulation. There is no solid evidence that this is actually the case, and I’m certainly not suggesting that we are all secretly living inside some giant computer programme! But sometimes I wonder if there’s another kind of simulation that we willingly put ourselves into.

Not a Matrix where machines control our bodies, but a much quieter one, built from expectations! We absorb other people’s definitions of success, beauty, wealth, happiness and achievement so gradually that we stop noticing where they came from.

We compare ourselves with lives that were never real in the first place, and then spend years trying to make our own lives resemble them. We follow rules nobody explicitly gave us and chase goals we never consciously chose. We measure ourselves against standards designed by people who don’t know who we are. And perhaps that is the most convincing simulation of all: a life that looks like ours, feels like ours, but has been quietly programmed by everyone except us.

The strange business of becoming yourself

We talk a lot about “finding ourselves”, as though there is a fully formed person somewhere inside us waiting to be discovered. I’m not sure that’s how it works.

I believe we create ourselves as we go, through hundreds of tiny decisions. Some deliberate, some accidental, some that make perfect sense at the time and some that we only understand years later.

You try a new haircut or move somewhere new or change the way you work. You discover a band that becomes part of the soundtrack to a particular period of your life. You stop tolerating something you once accepted or become interested in things you would have found boring before. None of these things seem particularly important on their own. Together, they change the shape of your life.

And sometimes the most obvious sign that you’ve changed is not that you suddenly want something different but that you no longer want to explain why.

There was probably a time when you had very good reasons for every choice you made. You knew exactly why you dressed a certain way, worked a certain way, decorated your home a certain way, spent your free time a certain way…

Then, one day, you realise you are doing something simply because you’ve always done it or because everyone else is doing it. And that can be the beginning of something.

Your home knows

I think our homes are particularly good at exposing this.

You can walk into a room and see several different versions of yourself at once. There’s the object you bought because you genuinely loved it, the one you bought because it was practical, the one you bought because it was fashionable, and the one you inherited. There’s also that one you were convinced you’d love forever and now you don’t.

And then there are the things you keep because getting rid of them would require admitting that you have changed.

I don’t think we talk enough about that part. Decluttering is often presented as a practical exercise: keep what you use, get rid of what you don’t. But sometimes the difficult question isn’t ‘Do I use this?’ but ‘Does this still belong to me?’ There’s a difference.

I like the idea that a home doesn’t have to look impressive and it doesn’t even have to make sense to anyone else. It should contain evidence of the people who live there. So, my home is kind of unique and people comment that it reflects ME. They don’t say they wish they had a house like mine, but almost everyone says it’s “just like me”. And I’m happy about that.

The slightly ridiculous object I bought because it made me laugh, and all the books that have survived many house moves or the piece of furniture that is objectively too old but impossibly comfortable, and the strange bit of art that would probably make very little sense in somebody else’s living room…

Those things make a home feel lived in. More importantly, they make it feel YOURS.

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