Who am I?

Three Stories We Tell Ourselves about “Who I Am” — and a Fourth We Often Miss

1) Identity as given by place and people

I grew up in a small village where everyone knew each other. There was one shop, one school, two pubs. In a small village, your name and history are known, and your identity is tied to the people and the place: “She’s Tom’s mum,” “He’ll be just like his dad,” “They’ve always run the parish council.”

It’s like stepping back in time to a world where roles, duties, and rhythms handed you a ready-made self. You didn’t spend hours in the mirror of your mind trying to work out who you were or who you wanted to be. You just got on with what life had given you.

There are clear strengths when place and people provide identity: thick belonging, clear expectations, and a horizon bigger than “me.” Communities like this can carry you through grief and graft.

But the mould could be tight. If the village calls you “awkward” or “the next village shopkeeper,” those labels and identities were often unchangeable. Strangers struggled to get in. Some insiders never got out.

In our increasingly lonely and isolated society we tend to romanticise communities like these. They worked for some, but for those at the bottom of the social ladder, they could be suffocating. Still, it’s worth remembering that most humans, for most of history, did not ask, “Who am I?” They asked, “Whose am I?”

2) Identity as given by God and faith

Time moves on, and in the West our ways of forming identity have changed. Step inside the village church. A woman stands to be baptised. She renounces an old life, confesses Christ, joins a new family and is given a new name: Christian. Here, the “I” is located before God. We understand ourselves in relation to God, not apart from him—“our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (Augustine, Confessions). You are created in God’s image, fallen in Adam, and, by grace alone, adopted in Christ. Your worth is received, not achieved. (see Tim Keller, “Identity: Received, Not Achieved”))

It means dignity that doesn’t wobble with career. A clear direction for conscience. Vocation reframed as service under God.

But what starts as a step in the right direction can harden into boundary-policing and tribalism. I must be a certain way, act a certain way, live a certain way. Rather than allow me to flourish as who I am before God, I must fit a mould expected of me. This can blur two different things: the real call to sanctification (saying no to sin) and culture-coded expectations that Scripture leaves to wisdom and Christian liberty (Romans 14 (ESV)). Not only do I have to say no to evil desires, but I also must say no to good desires or ways of living that don’t fit the expectations of those around.

3) Identity as discovered and performed from within

Now picture a sixth-former on the tram to Meadowhall, rain on the windows as ever. Headphones. Notes app. Curating a self: playlist, outfit, style. She’s told by the culture around, “Be true to yourself.” This is the modern turn inward. Enlightenment reason (“I think, therefore I am”) slides into Romantic authenticity, then today’s therapeutic and branded self (see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self; Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self; Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic.) Meaning is mined from within and broadcast without.

It brings mobility and creativity. Language to express suffering and struggle. Many escape suffocating roles; there is at least the promise that, wherever you’re from, you can become whoever you want to be.

Yet if identity is a lifelong project you must invent and perform, exhaustion is built in. Anxiety rises. Belonging thins into subcultures. Truth risks shrinking to “my truth.” Algorithms reward performance, TikTok trends, Instagram Reels, the LinkedIn ‘personal brand’. Our identity is whatever we are able to convince both ourselves and the world we really are.

A fourth story: identity received in union with Christ

Christianity’s centre of gravity is not “Discover yourself,” but “You are in Christ.” One of the New Testament’s most common identity tag is not ‘Christian’ but ‘in Christ’. That phrase relocates the self: my life is folded into his. Chosen in him (eternity past), crucified and raised with him (history), hidden with him (present security), and appearing with him in glory (future). See Ephesians 1:3–14 (ESV); Galatians 2:20 (ESV); Colossians 3:3–4 (ESV).

Your identity is received rather than achieved. Your core name - beloved, forgiven, adopted - arrives from outside, secured by Jesus. You work from identity, not for it (see Tim Keller, “Identity: Received, Not Achieved”).

You are already new, and you are being renewed. No treadmill of endless self-invention, yet no fatalism of “that’s just me.”

Identity in Christ is both personal and communal. To be in Christ is to be in his body. Church isn’t just somewhere we go it becomes the family where names, gifts, wounds, and hopes are held together. That speaks to the loneliness our third story can’t cure.

Union with Christ gathers the best of the other stories and heals their deficits. It honours community without trapping you in it; it centres God without erasing personality; it validates our experiences and personalities without making them sovereign.

If the village said, “You are your place,” and modernity says, “You are your performance,” union with Christ says, “You are whose you are.” Identity lands as grace before it becomes task. It comes with a people before it becomes a project. And the pressure lifts.