Finding Your Truth: Identity, Becoming, and the Work of Living Authentically
There's a question I come back to often, both in my own life and in the room with clients: what does it actually mean to live true to yourself?
It sounds simple until you try to answer it. Most of us were handed a version of who we're supposed to be before we ever had the chance to ask who we actually are. Family expectations, cultural scripts, gender norms, belief systems, the quiet pressure of fitting in with the people around us. These all shape an identity that can look convincing from the outside and most of us can move through life with this accepted truth of who we are, until one day, something feels off. It may be that going into work every day doesn’t feel as fulfilling. It may feel like we don’t truly feel seen by the people we surround ourselves with. It may be that the place we’re living in doesn’t actually feel like home. Yet, we were told that this is how life should be. We’re supposed to go to school, find a partner, get a good job, make a nice home for ourselves, and it’ll all work out. That’s living the dream, right? Well I tried that, and I realized along the way, it wasn’t my dream.
Learning The Hard Way
I have a very distinct memory of my first day in my corporate job. I was so proud of myself for landing the gig, finishing my bachelor’s degree, moving out with my girlfriend, and dressing up for my first day on the job. This was it. I did it. This is the moment where it all comes together and I’ll be totally fulfilled.
The entire first week, I came home feeling empty. By the end of week one, I came home to my partner and broke down in tears. I kept asking her: “Is this it? Is this what it’s gonna be? Is this the rest of my life? Is this what happiness and meaning feel like? Because it all feels completely meaningless to me.” That was the start of a new beginning for me, where I began to ask myself these first existential questions about happiness, meaning, and what it meant to live a truly fulfilling life. I started to read all the books to find the answer, such as Matthieu Ricard’s Happiness, Shawn Achor’s Happiness Advantage, and Tal Ben-Shahar’s Happier. Each one of them are wonderful reads with great lessons, and felt better for a moment, until I’d come back to the question “Is this really it?”
I had to hit all of my own walls to learn the difference between what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as Accepted Purpose versus Discovered Purpose. In the case of this conversation, I’d reframe it to Accepted Identity versus Discovered Identity. My journey of discovering my identity has been one of beauty and hardship as I uncovered my true sexual identity, my true gifts that I bring to the world and the work that makes me feel at my best and where I can help others be at their best, true friendships where I can show up authentically and feel seen, and true forms of intimate relationship that are mutually fulfilling. This has given me a sense of purpose in how I want to help people continually discover their best selves, and lean into what feels true to them.
The Choice Point: Turning Toward What's True
In my individual work with clients, I draw a lot from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). One of the core tools I use is something called the choice point. At any given moment, when we're faced with a difficult thought, feeling, or situation, we have a fork in the road. One direction is what's called experiential avoidance: the things we do to escape, numb, or push away discomfort. This can look like distraction, over-working, people-pleasing, staying busy, staying quiet, or simply refusing to look at the thing that's asking to be looked at (what may feel true but hard to see). It makes sense that we do this. Avoidance is a powerful strategy and works for all of us in different ways. It’s a powerful coping mechanism that is working to keep us safe. But over time, avoidance has a cost, and that cost is usually distance from the life and identity we actually want.
The other direction at the choice point is committed action: moving toward what matters to you, even when it's uncomfortable, even when it's scary, even when you don't have full clarity yet on where it leads. This is where values work comes in. Not values as a list of nice-sounding words, but values as a compass you keep returning to when you're deciding how to show up. What actually matters to you? Not what you were told should matter. What do you want your life, your relationships, and your sense of self to be built around? \
If you want a clearer picture of what experiential avoidance actually looks like and why it holds so much power over us, the video below that I regularly share with clients does a great job explaining it.
What This Looks Like for Queer Folks
Speaking from lived experience, this process of accepted versus discovered identity carries a distinct shape for queer people. Many of us grew up being taught, explicitly or through a thousand small signals (often in the form of microaggressions and microinvalidations), that certain parts of ourselves needed to be managed, hidden, or quieted in order to stay safe and accepted. We learned to turn away from the parts of us that were asking to be seen, long before we had any language for what those parts even were.
What I've witnessed, both personally and in my work with clients, is that the process of turning back toward those parts of yourself is both genuinely hard and wonderfully rewarding. It can bring grief for the years spent performing a version of yourself that wasn't quite true. It can bring fear, because discovery means giving up the certainty of the accepted identity, even when that identity never felt full true to begin with. It can bring a kind of relief and aliveness that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't felt the particular weight of masking parts of themselves for so long. May it be queer men discovering joyful femme parts of themselves, or folks learning that the gender binary has never felt true and discovering the gender spectrum fills their cup, or transgender folks finally being able to exhale in their process of discovering their true selves that has been waiting to be seen and cherished. Many of us must move through this while facing covert and overt discrimination, criticism, and shame that will make us want to take two steps back. This is the power of community and experts like therapists who can help carry you through this self-discovery process while you feel seen, heard and respected.
What This Means in Intimate Relationships
In the context of couples therapy and working with diverse relationship structures, including polyamory and various forms of ethical non-monogamy, one of the things I pay close attention to is whether each partner is showing up with genuine curiosity about the other person's journey of self-discovery. Not just who they are today, but how they came to be that way. What experiences shaped them. What they were taught to accept about themselves before they had the chance to discover anything on their own.
This matters because partners often meet each other mid-story. You get someone at a particular point in their becoming, and if you're not careful, it's easy to relate to a version of them that's already outdated, or to expect them to have arrived somewhere they haven't gotten to yet or worse, expect them to be someone that isn’t true to them. Real intimacy asks that you to stay curious about who your partner is discovering themselves to be, even as that discovery continues to unfold, sometimes in ways that surprise you both. This is where I draw from the Gottman Method's concept of building love maps: truly knowing your partner means continually updating your understanding of their inner world rather than assuming you already have the full picture. When both people in a relationship can hold that kind of curiosity for each other, and for themselves, the relationship becomes a place where discovery is welcomed rather than something to be managed or feared.
Hot tip - check out Esther Perel’s card game Where Should We Begin card deck as a beautiful way to connect with your partner and build love maps.
The Constant Work of Becoming
This discovery process doesn't have an endpoint; it’s constant work because there's no final version of yourself waiting at the end. It's an ongoing relationship with your own becoming, and I'd argue that's actually the beautiful part! You get to keep meeting yourself and reconnecting to those wonderfully free childlike parts of yourself, that part of you that was here before the world got its hands on you. You get to keep choosing, at the choice point, to move toward what's true rather than away from it. You get to choose the person you want to be, every day, through small actions or major life decisions. This is what Brené calls the developmental milestone of midlife:
On my journey to leading a meaningful and fulfilling life, I’ve had to learn that it’s all meaningful IF we choose to make it so. Living into my “accepted identity” for such a significant part of my life isn’t something that went wrong. It’s part of what I had to move through to be where I am today. I’ve chosen to cherish the beautiful, loving moments of my journey, and slowly let go of the parts that no longer serve me. I’ve chosen to self-reflect along the way on what it means to lead a life of truth, and one in which I hope to look back one day and say “it was good ‘ay”.
If any of this resonates with you, whether you're at the very beginning of asking what's actually true for you or you've been doing this work for years and know it never really ends, I'd be glad to be a part of that process with you. This is the work I do with individuals navigating identity and self-discovery, and with couples learning to hold curiosity for each other's ongoing becoming. If you're queer and looking for a therapist who understands this terrain from the inside, you can read more about my approach to LGBTQ2+ therapy or get in touch for a conversation. You can also book a free consultation directly if you're ready to take that next step.
When you're ready, I'm here for it.
- phil
