Charles Bukowski once asked a question I keep coming back to. The gist: do you remember who you were before the world shaped you into who it wanted?
I think about this one a lot.
Not in some wishy-washy, midlife-crisis way. More like... I'll be sitting in a meeting, listening to someone drone on about stakeholder alignment and cross-functional synergy, and a thought hits me: When did I start speaking like this? When did I become the person who nods along to phrases nobody would use with their friends?
The Slow Erasure
Here's what happens. You start your career with opinions, rough edges, and a personality. You like the things you like. You hate the things you hate. You have a sense of what matters.
Then, one small compromise at a time, the world sands you down.
You learn to say "challenging" instead of "terrible." You learn to nod when you disagree. You learn to dress a certain way, write emails a certain way, laugh at certain jokes. Each adjustment is tiny. Each one makes sense in context. And after twenty years, you look in the mirror and wonder: Who is this person?
According to Gallup, 55% of American workers get their sense of identity from their job. Pew Research landed on a similar figure... 51%. Think about what this means. More than half of us answer "who are you?" with a job title. Not "I'm someone who loves hiking and terrible puns and reads too many books about World War II." But "I'm a Senior Vice President of Whatever."
And when the job goes away... through layoff, retirement, burnout, or a career change... those people face a genuine identity crisis. Because the job wasn't something they did. It was who they were.
The Person Before the Title
I try to remember who I was before all this. Before the titles, the leadership books, the interviews, the conference stages.
I was a kid who loved computers. Not in a "future career in technology" way. In a "stay up until 2am writing BASIC programs on a Commodore 64 because it felt like magic" way. I built things because building things was fun. Nobody told me it would be useful. Nobody told me it would "open doors." I did it because my brain lit up.
I was someone who asked too many questions. Teachers found this annoying. Bosses would later find it annoying too. But asking questions was how I understood the world. It wasn't a "leadership skill." It was me.
I was someone who got angry about unfairness. Still am, honestly. The difference is I've learned to package the anger into polite language and constructive feedback. Sometimes I wonder if the unpackaged version was more honest.
The Nostalgia Trap
Now, I'm not saying we should all quit our jobs and go back to writing BASIC. Nostalgia is comfortable, but it's not a plan.
I noticed Pokemon's 30th anniversary trending across Reddit this week, with people sharing memories and fan art from their childhoods. Millions of adults reconnecting with something they loved as kids. There's something beautiful in it... but also something a bit sad. Because for many of them, those childhood passions became "something I used to be into" rather than a living part of who they are.
Real remembering isn't about going backwards. It's about asking: What parts of the original me did I abandon because someone told me they weren't useful?
The world doesn't erase you all at once. It does it through a thousand tiny edits. A manager who says "you're too direct." A company culture where enthusiasm is "unprofessional." A promotion path requiring you to become someone you're not.
Sense of Self as Armour
Kelly Swingler, who I've had the pleasure of working with on Step It Up HR, has this equation I keep coming back to:
Toxicity minus sense of self equals burnout.
Read it again. It's saying the damage a toxic workplace does to you is directly proportional to how little you know yourself.
If you know who you are... what you value, what you won't tolerate, where your boundaries sit... a bad boss is a problem to solve, not an existential threat. You deal with it or you leave. But if your entire identity is wrapped up in the job? You have no ground to stand on. The toxicity fills every space you should have reserved for yourself.
This is why I've seen brilliant people crumble in workplaces others would shrug off. It's not about toughness. It's about whether you have a "you" outside of the work. And in my research for "Bad Bosses Ruin Lives"... where 99.5% of survey respondents said they'd had one or more types of bad bosses... the people who survived toxic environments best were the ones with a strong sense of who they were beyond the office.
How to Remember
So how do you find the person you were before the world got its hands on you?
I don't have a five-step framework. But I do have three questions worth sitting with.
What made you lose track of time as a kid?
Not "what were you good at." Not "what got you praised." What made time disappear? For me, it was building things and figuring out how stuff worked. For you, it might have been drawing, or arguing with your siblings about who was right, or taking apart a radio to see what was inside.
The activity doesn't matter. The state does. You were most yourself when you were so absorbed you forgot to perform.
What opinions do you hold nobody gave you?
Strip away everything your industry believes, your company preaches, your LinkedIn feed reinforces. What do you think about leadership, about fairness, about how people should treat each other... based on your own experience, not from a book?
Those stubborn, hard-won opinions are you. The rest is borrowed furniture.
What would you do if the title disappeared tomorrow?
If someone took away your job title, your email signature, your LinkedIn profile... who are you at dinner? What do you talk about? What gets you animated?
If the answer is "I don't know," you've done what millions of us have done: you've outsourced your identity to an employer. And employers, to be blunt about it, don't return what they borrow.
The Question Worth Asking
I'm in my fifties now. I've held more titles than I care to count. I've run teams, built products, spoken on stages, written a book. And the most useful thing I've done in the last few years is reconnect with who I was before all of it started.
Not to go back. Going back isn't the point. But to check: is the person I'm being today connected to the person I've always been? Or did I wander so far from the original blueprint I forgot there was one?
Bukowski was a drunk and a cynic, but he asked the right question. Who were you before the world told you who to be?
If you don't know the answer, start looking. Not in your CV. Not in your performance reviews. Look in the parts of yourself you stopped feeding because nobody was measuring them.
Those parts aren't dead. They're waiting.