I Don’t Know Who I Am Anymore: What Happens When You Outgrow an Old Version of Yourself
There is a very weird stage of personal growth that I don't think we talk about enough.
It's when you've become aware enough to realize:
I don't think I'm that person anymore.
But you haven't gotten far enough to confidently say:
This is who I am now.
So you're just…somewhere in the middle.
And the middle can feel like an identity crisis.
You might question your career. Your friendships. Your style. Your routines. Your priorities. Your goals. Your beliefs. The things you used to enjoy. The way you show up online.
You may even find yourself looking at your own Instagram bio thinking:
Who the hell am I supposed to say I am now?
I know that one particularly well.
Because I've changed mine approximately 700 times.
Not literally.
But enough.
For a long time, I knew exactly how to explain who I was
If someone asked me what I did, I had an easy answer.
I'm an esthetician.
Then eventually:
I own a spa.
Those identities made sense.
I had been in the beauty and wellness industry essentially my entire adult life. I became licensed in esthetics as a teenager and spent the years that followed building experience, clientele and businesses.
I worked in salons and spas. I became a lead esthetician. I worked in retail beauty. I represented a skincare brand. I opened my own business. I merged businesses and became a co-owner. I left that partnership. I eventually rebuilt True Indigo.
There were plenty of changes along the way, but they all existed underneath one recognizable umbrella.
Beauty.
Skincare.
Spa.
Esthetics.
Even when my business evolved, I still knew which box to check.
And then I started becoming someone who didn't fit neatly inside that box anymore.
The hardest part wasn't realizing I wanted something different
It was figuring out how to explain it.
Because my work had gradually expanded beyond skincare.
I loved education.
I loved mentoring.
I loved helping people understand themselves.
I became increasingly interested in personal development, self-trust, identity, intuition, nervous-system awareness and the ways our internal worlds influence the lives we create externally.
I started a podcast.
I created a community.
I started developing what would eventually become The True Indigo Method.
I began consulting businesses.
I wanted to facilitate experiences and conversations.
And eventually I had to acknowledge that although esthetics was still part of my expertise, it wasn't the entire story anymore.
That sounds simple when I write it now.
It did not feel simple while I was living it.
Because what do you call yourself when the title you've used for more than a decade no longer explains you?
Apparently, if you're me, you brainstorm approximately 47 job titles.
Mentor.
Guide.
Practitioner.
Consultant.
Educator.
Personal-development mentor.
Resonance guide.
Some combination of all of the above.
At some point I realized the title problem wasn't really a title problem.
I was trying to find language for an identity that was still forming.
Identity shifts are uncomfortable because humans like continuity
We like knowing who we are.
Even when we don't particularly like the version of ourselves we've become, familiarity creates a certain kind of safety.
We know the rules.
We know how people see us.
We know how we're supposed to behave.
And other people know what to expect from us.
Then you change.
Suddenly the things that used to define you don't feel as important.
Your priorities shift.
Something you worked years to achieve stops feeling exciting.
You become less interested in maintaining relationships that require you to abandon yourself.
Your definition of success changes.
You may become more private.
Or more outspoken.
Or more spiritual.
Or less spiritual.
You might want a slower life after spending years chasing achievement.
You might suddenly become ambitious after spending years making yourself small.
And then comes the uncomfortable question:
If I'm not that person anymore…who am I?
Sometimes we confuse identity with evidence
One of the reasons changing identity can feel so destabilizing is that our old identities usually have evidence behind them.
I could prove I was an esthetician.
There was a license.
There were years of experience.
There were businesses.
There were clients.
There were certifications.
There were treatment rooms and products and equipment and websites and photos.
There was a whole external world reflecting that identity back to me.
But when you're becoming someone new, the internal change often happens before the evidence exists.
That's the awkward part.
You might feel called toward something you haven't built yet.
You might know you want to live differently before your circumstances allow you to completely change your life.
You might internally identify with a version of yourself that nobody else has met yet.
There aren't necessarily receipts.
So you start questioning yourself.
Who am I to say I do this?
Who am I to become that?
What will people think?
What if I change my mind again?
That last one was a big one for me.
I had to stop treating changing my mind like evidence that I couldn't trust myself
This was one of the more important realizations in my own transition.
I used to think self-trust meant making the right decision and sticking to it.
Now I think that's an incredibly limited definition.
Sometimes trusting yourself means allowing yourself to make a decision based on who you are now, even if a future version of you eventually chooses differently.
I loved esthetics.
That wasn't fake.
I wanted to own a spa.
That wasn't a mistake.
I wanted to build True Indigo in the ways I built it at different stages.
Those versions were real.
And then I changed.
That doesn't invalidate them.
We have this strange tendency to look backward from our current awareness and decide that if something eventually stopped fitting, we must have been wrong to choose it in the first place.
I don't believe that anymore.
Something can be right for one version of you and wrong for the next.
That's not failure.
That's evolution.
The grief of outgrowing yourself is real
This is another piece we don't talk about enough.
Growth gets marketed as this beautiful, empowering process where you release what no longer serves you and skip happily into your new aligned life.
Sometimes it is exciting.
Sometimes it also sucks.
Because you can miss something and still know you're finished with it.
You can grieve an old version of yourself without wanting to become her again.
When I made the decision to fully step away from taking spa clients, there was relief.
There was clarity.
There was excitement.
And there was grief.
I had spent years accumulating professional products, equipment, furniture and all the physical pieces that represented the business I'd built.
Around that time, I had a dream that became surprisingly significant to me.
In the dream, I was somewhere that felt like India. There was urgency. Something was chasing us, and we had to leave quickly.
I realized I had forgotten my belongings.
And I remember the feeling of knowing I couldn't go back for them.
But somewhere inside that dream was another realization:
I can buy new things.
When I woke up, that stayed with me.
Not because I thought the dream was literally telling me to throw away my belongings.
It represented something much bigger.
I could leave things behind.
I could build again.
I could acquire new things.
I could create a life around the person I was becoming instead of continuing to organize my future around everything I'd already accumulated.
That dream didn't create the awareness.
But it reflected something I think I already knew.
I was ready to let go.
Your old identity isn't something you need to destroy
This is where I think personal development can get unnecessarily dramatic.
We hear phrases like:
Kill the old version of yourself.
I don't really resonate with that.
I don't want to kill her.
She built everything I'm standing on.
The girl who became an esthetician gave me an entire education in people.
The business owner taught me resilience.
The spa owner taught me about leadership, marketing, sales, client experience, operations and community.
The versions of me who stayed too long taught me boundaries.
The versions who made mistakes gave me discernment.
The versions who didn't trust themselves helped me understand why inner authority matters so much.
You don't have to reject who you were in order to become who you're becoming.
Integration is different from erasure.
You get to bring things with you.
Just maybe not everything.
Reflection is where identity starts becoming clearer
In The True Indigo Method, Awareness comes first.
You notice that something has changed.
Then comes Reflection.
This is where you begin examining the person you've been without immediately trying to decide who you're supposed to become.
Ask yourself:
Which parts of my identity actually feel like me—and which parts have become roles I maintain because other people expect them?
That's a very different question from:
Who should I become?
Because sometimes finding yourself isn't about creating an entirely new person.
It's about removing the things that have been obscuring you.
Expectations.
Roles.
Old coping mechanisms.
Other people's definitions of success.
Identities you needed at one point but don't need anymore.
Then you start discovering what remains.
That's where Resonance enters.
Resonance asks: What actually feels like me now?
This stage can be surprisingly fun once you stop demanding immediate certainty from yourself.
Instead of asking:
What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life?
Try:
What am I curious about right now?
Instead of:
What should my career be?
Try:
Which parts of my work make me feel most like myself?
Instead of:
Who am I?
Try:
When do I feel most like me?
That question can tell you a lot.
Maybe you feel most like yourself when you're teaching.
When you're creating.
When you're outside.
When you're helping someone see something differently.
When you're traveling.
When you're with certain people.
When you're alone.
When you're making something with your hands.
When you're having conversations that go much deeper than small talk.
Those moments are clues.
Try this if you don't know who you are anymore
Take a piece of paper and make three columns.
At the top, write:
WHO I WAS | WHAT STILL FITS | WHAT I'M DISCOVERING
Don't overthink it.
Under Who I Was, write down identities, roles, goals, beliefs or characteristics that have defined you.
Maybe:
Mother.
Entrepreneur.
Caretaker.
High achiever.
Party girl.
Corporate professional.
People pleaser.
Athlete.
Wife.
Independent one.
Responsible one.
Beauty professional.
Whatever belongs there.
Then look at each one and ask:
Does this still resonate with me?
If it does, move it into What Still Fits.
If you're unsure—or you sense something new emerging—put it under What I'm Discovering.
You aren't trying to create a final identity statement.
You're simply noticing movement.
Because you're allowed to be unfinished.
You don't need a perfectly defined new identity before you move forward
This may be one of the biggest things I've learned through my own transition.
I wanted language before I had fully lived the experience.
I wanted the title.
The website.
The framework.
The explanation.
I wanted to package the transformation while I was still transforming.
Eventually, I realized I had to give myself room to become.
And ironically, that's when things started getting clearer.
The True Indigo Method became clearer.
My work became clearer.
The relationship between my personal-development work, education, experiences, consulting and esthetics became clearer.
Not because I forced everything into a perfect category.
Because I started recognizing the thread running through all of it.
I help people understand what they're experiencing, recognize what actually fits them, trust themselves enough to act on it and build something that reflects who they really are.
I've actually been doing versions of that for years.
The container changed.
The underlying part of me didn't.
Maybe you're not losing yourself
If you're thinking:
I don't know who I am anymore,
I want you to consider another possibility.
Maybe you're not losing yourself.
Maybe you're losing familiarity.
Maybe some of the roles you've used to define yourself are falling away.
Maybe your internal identity is changing faster than your external circumstances.
Maybe you're discovering that things you once wanted aren't things you want anymore.
Maybe you aren't supposed to immediately replace your old identity with a shiny new one.
Maybe you're in the middle.
The middle isn't always comfortable.
But it's incredibly informative.
Because between who you were and who you think you should become is an opportunity to discover something much more interesting:
Who you actually are.
If you're in an identity shift right now
You don't need someone else to hand you a new identity.
You may need space to hear yourself without all the noise around you.
My work through The True Indigo Method is built around that process: Awareness, Reflection, Resonance, Inner Authority and Integrated Alignment.
If you're navigating a transition, questioning who you are now, or trying to understand what actually fits this version of your life, you can explore the Method or work with me one-on-one.
