There’s the you that you are…and the you that you had to become to make it this far.

The second one — the assumed identity — is a quiet masterpiece of survival.

• It’s who you learned to be to belong.
• It’s who you became to be taken seriously.
• It’s who you built to stay safe, competent, reliable, good.

It works. For a long time, it works. People applaud it. They reward it. They trust it. You trust it too — because it feels like you.

Until one day, it doesn’t.

There’s no explosion. What you observe is a slow disintegration, where the smallest things start to feel heavy. You find yourself pretending interest, summoning energy, manufacturing care. You look at your life — the one you built from this assumed self — and realize it doesn’t quite fit anymore. It’s kind of like wearing someone else’s skin that used to feel like home.

When the identity you assumed can no longer hold you, it’s not because you’ve failed. It’s because that false self, could never hold the real you.

You built it to protect yourself from uncertainty, from disapproval, from not being enough. And it served you beautifully — until it could no longer do that for you. The cost of keeping it became too high.

This is the moment where you feel your entire world collapsing…except you’re not losing who you are. You’re losing who you’ve pretended to be in order to be accepted, understood and needed.

It’s confusing because the assumed self can’t tell the difference between disintegration and rebirth. So it screams — in anxiety, exhaustion, self-doubt, guilt. It wants to fix, perform, prove and be useful again.

But there’s nothing to fix. You’re not broken. You’re just coming out of costume.

The assumed self did its job.

It carried you across rough terrain, through impossible seasons. But it will NEVER be able to take you into freedom.

And freedom is what’s calling now.

If you’re in that place — the space between what no longer works and what hasn’t yet arrived — stay gentle. You will not find answers there. Only truth.
You will not feel productive there. Only honest. And sometimes honesty is the most productive thing you can be.

Because this space — this dark, still, confusing middle — is where you stop rehearsing and start remembering:

• Who you were before the performance.
• Who you are when the mask falls.

And you finally get the room to contemplate, who you are and how that looks now that you’ve lost the shroud.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

What part of you have you been performing for so long that you’ve mistaken it for who you truly are — and what would happen if you finally set it down?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer, possibility thinker, musician, Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, and MCODE Legacy Coach. I help leaders and soul-driven professionals decode the deeper patterns shaping their business, work, identities, and results especially when it look like a performance issue but it’s really misalignment in disguise.

If something in your life or business feels off and you can’t quite name it, message me. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to see what’s really going on.