If you do not spend time getting to know yourself, you will absorb everyone else's definition of you and then spend years unlearning who you never were.

Identity does not stay empty. If you do not fill it deliberately, the environment will fill it for you. The opinions, expectations, and projections of other people settle into the space where self-knowledge would have been. By the time you notice, the borrowed identity feels native. The work then is not just building something new. It is first dismantling what was never yours.