Can Your Identity Actually Change? What I've Learned Living It
Last week I sat down with a journalist on a bench by a canal in Amsterdam.
She had questions about identity - whether it's fixed, whether it can change, what holds people back from letting it shift.
And something happened mid-conversation. Words kept coming, dots connecting, things I'd lived and studied and been sitting with for years suddenly weaving together in real time. I left that bench still talking to myself, getting my steps in, things clicking into place.
Here's what landed.
What is identity, really?
If you look up the word identity, you find it means different things depending on where you look. Who someone is. The qualities that make you different from everyone else. The fact of being, or feeling that you are, a particular type of person.
And underneath all of those definitions, the Latin root - "identitas" from "idem" - meaning sameness. The state of being the same over time.
That's how most of us experience identity: as something fixed. We treat the labels we've taken on - I'm a designer, I'm a corporate person, I'm bad with money, I'm the responsible one - as though they were as permanent as our name.
But lived experience tells a different story. We change, we evolve, we outgrow things.
So the tension shows up between a word that says "fixed" and a life that keeps moving.
What if the sameness the word points to was never about the labels?
What if those were always temporary, and the real identity - the part that stays - is something underneath all of them?
The "I am" before the "I am a..."
That's what remains. And trusting that it's there is what makes it possible to let the rest shift.
The labels were never yours to begin with
Research in psychology shows that most people never actively choose their identity. They inherit it - from their parents, their culture, the expectations of the people around them - and then live by it without questioning whether it's actually theirs.
This connects to something I explored in last month's piece on Polarity and Rhythm - the Hermetic Principle of Mentalism, which says that reality begins as a mental construct. Your identity, the one that feels so solid and permanent, is a thought. A very old, very rehearsed thought - but a thought.
And if it's a thought, it's changeable.
By the time we reach our mid-thirties, according to Dr. Joe Dispenza's work in Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, 95% of who we are is a set of unconscious patterns running on autopilot. The brain defaults to familiar neural pathways because they're the path of least resistance.
It's simply trying to conserve energy by staying with what it knows. The problem is that what it knows is the past.
We experience identity as fixed - as sameness - when most of what we identify with was never consciously ours to begin with. Which means it can change.
What it actually takes to let a label go
I was vegan for ten years. Ten years of reading, studying, choosing, committing. It was part of how I saw myself, part of how others saw me.
And then, in recent years, my body started asking for something different. I resisted for a while - because everything I'd learned and trusted and built my identity around said otherwise. An akashic reading eventually confirmed what my body had already been telling me.
So I had to defy my own story.
Do I still eat mostly plant-based? Absolutely. But I had to let go of the label. And the hardest part wasn't the food. It was the question underneath: what will people think?
Which, as always, was so much louder in my mind than what reality actually proved. Because when I did open up about it, people told me it had given them permission to be more flexible too.
You doing you enables others to do the same.
That's the thing nobody tells you about identity shifts: they're never just personal.
The Hermetic Principle of Correspondence says "as above, so below; as within, so without." When you change on the inside, something shifts in the field around you.
The death nobody mentions
Here's what most people don't talk about when they talk about identity shifts: every change is a death. A death of the previous version of yourself.
That space between who you were and who you're becoming - the liminal space - is where most people find me. In transition. Leaving corporate, changing their role, wanting to embody a different aspect of their experience. The question they're really asking, without knowing it, is not how. It's: can I survive this?
Because there comes a moment of truth where you have to choose between the discomfort of staying the same and the discomfort of changing. Whichever one is bigger defines your next step.
What holds people back is rarely capability. More often it's the expectations of others - the people around you who need you to stay the same so their world keeps making sense. And underneath that, the oldest question: will I be safe?
It's a survival thing, after all.
What makes the shift possible
There's an idea I first encountered through the work of Maite Issa that has stayed with me. The word desire comes from the Latin "de sidere" - from the stars. The suggestion is that if you have a desire, it didn't come from nowhere. It's in you for a reason. It's bigger than you.
Desire is the fire starter for identity shifts. The pull toward something you can't fully explain yet but can't ignore either.
I've lived this across several versions of myself - industrial designer, corporate leader and now someone who helps people expand their perception of what's possible for them. That last description, by the way, is recent. For a long time I called myself a Human Design coach. And then I realised I'd done it again - attached my identity to a tool. The name change, the new website, the shift in how I describe my work: that was another identity dying so something truer could take shape.
The labels aren't facts. They're choices - most of them made so long ago, or so unconsciously, that they stopped feeling like choices at all.
The question is just whether you're ready to ask whose they were.
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Paula Torraco is a conscious leadership coach and Human Design guide based in Amsterdam, working with founders, leaders and teams who are already doing well and sense there's more.
