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That's definitely something I've experienced my whole life - people thinking one thing and then discovering that I'm not, hopefully. So I relate to having to fight that and claim my own identity, when people are trying to throw different ones at me.

Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free.

Identity for me is something that has to be played with and explored, and not become complacent about or uninterested in.

I feel more and more like 'myself' these days. Before becoming a father, I can remember a low-level feeling of somehow not quite being myself.

A lot of my personality was informed by feeling very different in the world I grew up in, feeling that I didn't fully belong, that my parents didn't belong.

I'm always interested in how people, myself included, have ideas of themselves, of how they thought they would be, or of how they want to be seen. And the older you get, the world keeps telling you different things about yourself. And how people either adjust to those things and let go of adolescent notions. Or they dig in deeper.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind - in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

I've been uncomfortable dealing with my identity since I was 16 years old.

I feel like I didn't know who I was when I was 15. I don't feel like you're who you are for life, not even when you're 20.

The brain is behind the really big questions we have. Who am I, what is my identity? What is that based on? If memories are encoded in connectomes, your personality might be in your connectome. If that's the case, that's the basis of your uniqueness as a person.