Charles Bukowski asked the question I've been avoiding for most of my adult life.
"Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?"
I read it one morning over coffee and sat with it longer than I expected. The honest answer wasn't comfortable. I'm not sure I do.
Not a small thing to admit.
The First Identity: Soldier
When I joined the Army, I was handed an identity along with the uniform.
Soldier. The word didn't describe what I did. It described what I was. Everything else followed: how I dressed, how I spoke, how I stood, what time I woke up. The Army is efficient at replacing the person you were with the person they need you to be.
I don't say it as a complaint. I learned more about leadership, discipline, and accountability in uniform than I did in any boardroom. The Army made me better at almost everything.
But it also replaced me.
The kid who showed up to basic training had interests, half-formed opinions, quirks. He liked fixing things. He read more than he let on. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and was oddly comfortable with not knowing.
The soldier who came out the other end was more capable. More disciplined. And significantly less able to answer the question: "Who are you, when you're not this?"
Nobody asks it while you're in. The structure holds. There's always a next thing: a next posting, a next mission, a next assignment. Identity by assignment is surprisingly comfortable when the assignments keep coming.
The discomfort comes when they stop.
The Second Identity: Tech Leader
I moved into tech after the Army, and the pattern repeated.
This time the identity arrived differently. Not through a uniform. Through a title. Developer. Manager. Director. VP. CTO.
Each title brought its own expectations about who I should be. How I should communicate in meetings. What I should read. What opinions were acceptable. How decisive I should appear. What I should care about.
I got good at it. The tech world rewards people who perform the role convincingly. If you show up as "the CTO" long enough, nobody questions whether there's a person underneath the function.
The problem is you start to forget there is one.
I spent years optimizing for the role. Filling my evenings with the right conferences, the right blogs, the right conversations at the right dinners. I built a version of myself the industry expected. I spoke the right language, had the right opinions, prioritized the right things.
It worked. By every visible measure, it worked.
Then one day I sat down and tried to think about what I'd do with a week off. Truly off. No agenda. No one to perform for.
No answer came.
Not because I was too busy. Because I'd stopped being anyone outside the role.
When Burnout Strips the Label Off
The burnout conversation usually focuses on overwork. Too many hours, too many demands, too little sleep. Those things are real.
But there's a more interesting pattern underneath. Burnout is sometimes what strips the label off and forces you to see there's nothing behind it.
When the role you've been performing for years starts to break down under pressure, there's nothing to fall back on. You've outsourced your sense of self to something temporary: an employer, a function, a title. And all three are more fragile than they look.
A genuinely terrifying place to find yourself.
I've talked to people in leadership who hit this wall and describe it the same way every time: "I don't know who I am outside of this." They say it like a confession. Like it's embarrassing.
It's not embarrassing. It's almost universal, if you've been doing this long enough and seriously enough.
The world is extremely efficient at telling you who to be. Career paths. Performance reviews. LinkedIn bios. Family expectations. The stories we tell about "success." These are all external scripts, handed to us so early and so consistently, we start to mistake them for ourselves.
Thomas Oppong wrote about this in Personal Growth on Medium: "We forget who we are after school systems, career paths, expectations, and gurus tell us what success looks like." He's right. Most of us don't notice it happening until the structure collapses and we're standing in the rubble wondering where we went.
The Questions Worth Asking
I started with simple ones.
What did I do for fun before I had a career to build? Not "what would be good for my brand." What I'd do if nobody was watching and there was no professional upside.
What did I read before I started reading things to make me better at my job?
What problems did I find interesting before "interesting" had to mean "commercially viable"?
What kind of conversations did I seek out before networking had a name?
None of these are questions the career teaches you to ask. The career teaches you to ask different ones: what's the next step, who do I need to know, what do I need to achieve. All forward-facing. All external.
The Bukowski question points backward. Not to wallow, but to find something.
What's Still There When You Look
The good news: what was there before doesn't disappear. It waits.
When I started asking honestly, I found a few things there long before the Army, long before any job title.
A genuine curiosity about how things work. Not strategic curiosity, not the performed curiosity of someone trying to look intellectually engaged at a conference. The kind where you pull something apart at midnight because you need to understand it, for no reason other than needing to understand it.
A preference for making things. Writing, building, solving problems with a visible output. Not managing. Not optimizing. Making.
An interest in people deeper than their usefulness to a project. What motivates them. What they're scared of. What they need from the people above them to do their best work. I've been drawn to this my whole life. The career gave it a professional frame. But the interest was there at nineteen, long before anyone would pay me for it.
Those things were there when I was seventeen. They were there before any title told me what they were worth.
They're still there now. The career didn't create them. It gave them a context to operate in, and then gradually convinced me the context mattered more than the things themselves.
You Don't Go Back. You Carry It Forward.
This isn't an argument for abandoning your career or pretending your professional experience didn't shape you. It did. It should have.
The Army made me better. The years in tech made me better. The failures especially made me better.
But there's a difference between being shaped by your experience and being replaced by it.
The work now, for me, is integration. Taking what was there before the labels and bringing it into what I'm building now. A company connecting leadership to real human feedback. Writing about things nobody says out loud in leadership culture. Speaking honestly about what good management requires.
Those things feel more like me than any title I've ever held.
The Bukowski question isn't nostalgic. It's not asking you to go back to who you were at twenty. It's asking you to recognize which parts of yourself you've quietly left behind and to decide whether you want them back.
Some of what you shed along the way was worth shedding. Some of it wasn't.
The work is knowing the difference.
So here's what I'd ask you to sit with this week. Outside your job title, outside the expectations of your role, outside the performance of whatever version of "professional" you've been building for years... who are you?
What were you interested in before your career told you what to be interested in?
I'm still working out my own answers. I'd guess you are too.