19. Recognising Yourself Again (After Adapting For Too Long)

After spending long periods adapting to environments, roles, or expectations, it’s easy to begin feeling slightly distant from yourself. Not in a dramatic way, but in the small, quiet ways that build over time.

In this episode, I explore what happens when that begins to shift,  when your energy starts to return, your curiosity comes back, and something in you begins to feel more like you again.

A conversation about recognising yourself again, and why those moments matter more than we often realise.

In this episode:

• Why adaptation can slowly distance us from parts of our identity
• How certain environments make it easier to recognise yourself again
• The difference between reinvention and recognition
• Why small moments of ease, curiosity, and energy are important signals
• How identity begins to reconnect before visible change happens

A reflection for you:
Where in your life do you currently feel most like yourself?

If this conversation resonated

If this episode resonated, you might find it helpful to go back to the previous episode on choice, and notice how the two connect.

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Transcript

I’m Patricia Ezechie, and this is Proactive Empowered Careers, a space for thinking about careers differently, not as something separate from who you are, but as an expression of you and the life you want to live.

Hello everyone, and welcome back.

In the last episode, we talked about adaptation, the ways we adjust ourselves so that we can function in the environments that we live and work inside. And sometimes we do that consciously, and other times we do that without even noticing. We also explored that adaptation isn’t unusual. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that we as human beings are able to function in the complex systems that we live and work in, in our workplaces, in institutions, in families, in professional cultures, even in society.

All of these systems involve expectations, and all of these systems also involve norms. Norms and signals about what behaviour is allowed, is rewarded, or is discouraged. And in response to those signals, we adapt. We learn how to operate inside those systems by adjusting our tone, our behaviour, and sometimes even our way of thinking. And for a time, sometimes even a long time, that works.

And as I showed in the last episode, that adaptation is intelligent because it’s protective, and in some situations it’s even necessary for survival.

The problem is that over time something else can happen. As we adapt and mould and change ourselves, we slowly begin to lose a sense of who we really are. Not all at once, but gradually, through all those small changes we’re continuously making to fit into those systems. And because it happens so slowly, it doesn’t feel, when it’s happening, like we’re losing ourselves. It just feels like this is life.

We begin to feel distant from ourselves. You’re still functioning, you’re still doing your job, you’re still managing life, but something feels slightly muted. You might notice that your energy feels flatter than it used to, or your curiosity has dimmed and it’s less than it used to be. Or that work that once felt really stimulating and exciting now feels like it takes a lot of effort. Conversations that once felt natural now start to feel like you have to monitor what you say before you say it.

And because nothing has collapsed externally, nothing’s changed dramatically outside of yourself, we begin to interpret this internally. We assume that maybe we’re just tired, or that this is about being an adult, it’s what it means to be an adult. Or we suddenly think we’ve lost our motivation.

But very often something else is happening. What we’re experiencing is the accumulated effect of all of that adapting. We’ve adapted so much and so often that we’ve actually lost track of who we really are.

I like to think of it as like a slow leak that you didn’t notice at first. It’s just drip, drip, a drip here and a drip there, and over time everything that that water is pooling in starts to feel heavier, and then all of a sudden the ceiling caves in.

Or another way of thinking about this, it’s like we’re constantly sanding down the edges of ourselves to fit into these boxes we’re trying to fit into, until we’ve been sanding ourselves down so much there’s nothing left of the original shape of who we were.

So when we adapt continuously to environments that don’t fully reflect who we are, we start operating slightly out of our natural centre. And after a while, that distance from who we are and who we really feel we are can feel like losing ourselves.

But here’s the really interesting part about all of this. The real you, the self, hasn’t gone anywhere. It hasn’t usually disappeared. It’s just been quiet, or turned down so much that we can’t hear it. Or it’s been edited, or redirected, or redacted.

And we notice that redaction or editing in small, unexpected moments. When we’re in an environment that feels different, or in a different kind of conversation, or working on a different kind of project, and suddenly everything feels different. Something shifts. We feel animated. We’re more curious. We feel more like ourselves. Ideas are coming naturally and we’re able to share them freely and easily. Our energy comes back. We’re speaking freely.

And when we experience that, it can be quite surprising, because it’s then that we’re suddenly reminded of something.

Because when we feel more like ourselves, when there’s more alignment between who we are and how we’re living and how we’re showing up, everything feels different. Our energy changes. Things feel easier and more natural. Not because everything is suddenly perfect, but because we’re not working against ourselves anymore. We’re not trying to be somebody else. We’re not trying to be who we’re not. We’re not trying to be two different people at the same time.

And there’s been a lot of research that explores this. If you look at the work of Carl Rogers and Edward Deci in particular, they’ve shown that when people are more aligned with themselves, their energy does increase, their stress reduces considerably, and they perform better.

And what’s happening when this happens isn’t reinvention. It’s just recognition of who we are. We’re recognising ourselves again. Those original signals and information about our identity are becoming visible to us again. They’re not hidden under those layers and layers of adaptation.

So what we’ve been exploring here, and in the last episode, is actually a very well-observed pattern in human development. When people spend long periods of time adapting to roles or environments, their identity becomes organised around those roles.

Sometimes psychologists describe this as role identity. You become the reliable one because the environment requires that. You become the expert. You become the fixer. You become the leader, the quiet contributor, the one who holds things together.

And those roles in and of themselves are not wrong or false, because they may be real parts of you. The issue is that over time they might start to dominate, and the rest of you, that makes you you, becomes quieter.

And this dominant, louder role that you’ve inhabited to survive in your environments, you might begin to feel that that is who you actually are. It begins to define how you experience and think about yourself.

You feel like you’ve become the job.

And sometimes it goes a step further. Sometimes what’s happening is that you’ve spent so long being who you think you need to be, you’ve lost touch with who you actually are. You’ve learned how to perform competence, professionalism, strength, success even. But somewhere underneath all that, there can be a real strain in trying to hold all of that together.

The version of you that doesn’t really fit versus the version of you that you’re performing. Because part of you is working to maintain that version, and another part of you knows it doesn’t fully fit.

And that strain has a cost.

And it becomes a real role identity trap. You start to forget that you’re even adapting at all. The adaptations stop feeling like parts that you’ve adopted for survival or to get by, and start feeling like they are you. You begin to experience these adaptations as your whole identity, not just a part of your identity.

Until something interrupts that pattern.

And that interruption can be surprisingly small. A conversation that feels easy and congruent. A piece of work that genuinely interests you. A space where you don’t have to monitor yourself. A place where your thinking feels free again, and you’re able to share it.

And you notice the contrast. You feel different. You feel more like yourself.

And recognising that can be both relieving and unsettling. Relieving because it reconnects you with parts of yourself that you felt you’d lost. And unsettling because it raises new questions.

It doesn’t just make you question the environment. It makes you question the version of yourself you’ve had to become inside those environments.

And those questions matter, especially when who you’ve become and who you are feel very far apart.

Because they begin to shift the internal narrative. Instead of assuming something inside you is wrong or broken, you begin noticing the relationship between your identity and the environments you’re in.

You begin seeing that different environments bring out different versions of you, and how differently you experience yourself depending on where you are.

You might notice that in some spaces you have more energy, more expression, more curiosity. And in other spaces you feel more contained, more guarded, less like yourself.

And in that noticing is where things begin to open up again.

Because in recognising yourself again, you begin to change how you interpret what you’re feeling. What previously felt like something being wrong starts to look more like misalignment. What felt like a loss of confidence begins to look more like being in the wrong environment.

And the things you were blaming yourself for don’t feel quite the same anymore, because you’re seeing the bigger picture.

And that reframing matters.

Because when we realise that we haven’t lost ourselves, something else comes back. Curiosity.

Curiosity about the environments that allow us to feel more like ourselves. About the work that gives us energy rather than draining us. About the conditions that support our thinking and our way of being.

And that curiosity is powerful, because it opens the door to possibility.

And I’ve experienced this in my own life as well. There was a period where I was completely burnt out, and a lot of that came from trying to be a version of a successful leader that I’d been shown I had to be, told I had to be, and felt I had to become.

And if I’m really honest, there was also the pressure of being a black woman in some of those spaces, feeling like I had to be twice as good to even warrant my place there. And that meant I adapted even more.

And over time, I drifted so far away from myself that I lost sight of who I was.

And that shift back didn’t come from doing more. It came from creating space to see what was happening, from changing my life structure, from understanding what my system could sustain, and from recognising the ecosystems where I could actually thrive.

And most of all, it came from recognising myself again.

Realising that who I was wasn’t something that needed to be fixed. It was actually where my strength came from.

And everything began to change from there.

So once we recognise ourselves again, we begin to ask a new question. It might be quiet at first, but it’s a pivotal one.

What else might be possible for me?

And that’s what we’ll explore next time.

So for now, if this resonates with you, just notice a few things this week. Where do you feel most like yourself? Where does your thinking feel relaxed? Where does your curiosity show up naturally? Where do you feel energised rather than depleted?

And as you notice, don’t analyse. Don’t try to decide. Just notice.

Because sometimes recognising yourself again is the first signal that something in your life is ready to change.

So until next time, take the very best care of yourselves.

This has been Proactive Empowered Careers. If today’s episode resonated, follow or subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss what comes next. And if this podcast is supporting you, leaving a short review helps others find these conversations.

And remember, your career isn’t separate from who you are. It’s an expression of you and the life you want to live.