How Do I Find Myself Again as a Man?

Man holding a kitten, finding yourself agan

There’s a kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. It’s not recognizing the man doing your job, sitting at your table, and answering to your name. You know something’s off, but you can’t point to when it started, because it didn’t start on a single day. It started so early and built so slowly that by the time you noticed, it already felt like you.

So before anything else, here’s a question to consider rather than answer out loud: where does a man start? Where did you start? I don’t mean where you were born, your family, your town, or the year. I mean before any of that, the you before anything had touched you yet.

This blog post complements Episode 10 of Course Correction. You can watch the full episode below, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and others.

Who You Were Before Anything Shaped You

A kitten is born. It doesn’t matter where, whether that’s a warm garage, underneath someone’s porch, or the concrete behind a dumpster in an alley. What matters is how it is in those first moments: it isn’t scared or brave, and it doesn’t understand trust or distrust. It knows nothing about where it came from or how the world will shape it into the cat it becomes, so it just arrives clean, innocent, perfect, and hungry.

“You arrive the same way: clean, innocent, perfect, and hungry.”

— Stephen Rodi

That was your beginning, and it’s where everything you are started: your personality, your sense of humor, your capacity to love. In that moment you were infinite possibilities, because the world hadn’t started shaping you yet. As you sit here reading this, that’s still who you are.

How You Adapted to Survive

That kitten didn’t think about what it needed to become. It just became it. There was no moment where it chose caution over trust, because the garage, the backyard, or the street created conditions that required it to adapt, and part of it made the adjustments needed to stay alive.

You did the same thing. In Episode 7, we talked about the wiring that helped you do it: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, four reflexes every animal shares. That wiring formed out of the only material on hand, the threat and whatever worked against it, and something had to organize a structure around it. Something had to become the self that ran the reflex, wore the armor, and built the shield.

What the Ego Really Is (and Why It Isn’t the Enemy)

Psychologists call that structure the ego. I don’t mean ego the way we describe someone’s personality, as arrogance or swagger. In its oldest sense, the ego is the part of the self that organizes around a threat. It isn’t the villain of your story, because it’s an essential survival tool and it’s what has kept you alive.

That’s why “where does a man start?” may not sound like a real question at first. It sounds like a threat. The ego’s whole job is protecting the structure it built, so when you ask what’s underneath, it reads the question as an attack, the same way your brain reads a look, a tone, or a silence as danger decades after the danger is gone.

The ego isn’t the man, though. It isn’t who you are, and it never was.

The Real You Is Still There

I’ve said before that the shields don’t just protect you, they blind you. They’ve been protecting you for so long that you can’t see the world clearly through them, and so you can’t see yourself clearly either.

What’s new is this: the man on the inside of that shield isn’t a stranger. He isn’t a self-improvement project, someone you have to create in order to survive, or a future version of you that doesn’t exist yet. He’s the one who was there before the reflex ever needed a self to organize around, and he’s always been there.

“Who you were is who you are.”

— Stephen Rodi

You haven’t disappeared, waiting to be rebuilt from nothing. You’re still here, buried under something that was only ever doing its job to help you survive.

The Choice to Change

Your answers are deep inside you, and they’re connected to your choice to change. That choice is the center of everything we’re talking about and the driving force inside Course Correction, because without it, you’ll never consider that there’s a different path.

I know when that moment happened for me. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror, with my eyes open or closed, and I felt it in my heart the day my son’s eyes showed me he was afraid of me. I recognized my cycle of searching without any real direction and always coming back to the same realization: I was stuck.

I was done with that cycle, and it was time to find new information to help me out of my rut. I didn’t know how, but I knew that if I didn’t, I might stay lost and disconnected for the rest of my life. So I chose to change.

This Week’s Practice: The Mirror

At some point this week, stand in front of a mirror and look at yourself the way you’d look at anyone else, straight on at all of you. Then close your eyes and ask yourself, “Who do I see now?”

Don’t reach for the answer with your eyes open, because they’re wired into the same system we’ve spent nine episodes describing. They’re useful and honest about threat, but they weren’t built for this particular question. Close your eyes and see who’s still there once they’re shut.

That’s the practice, with nothing to fix and nothing to write down. Just sense who you’ve been since your beginning. This podcast can help you recognize the shape of what you built, and moving it out of the way long enough to see what it’s been covering is the work we can do together. You can start with the mirror this week.

Book a free conversation with Stephen.

Prefer to listen?

Missed the last episode? Read Episode 9: The Glass Shield.

Commonly Asked Questions

Is the real me still in there somewhere?

Yes. What you built to survive was never a replacement for who you are. It was protection, and the man underneath it is the same one who was there before any of it had a reason to form. He hasn’t gone anywhere.

Why do I feel like a different person than I used to be?

The structure that formed around your survival gets so good at running your life that it starts to feel like the whole of you. It isn’t. It’s the part of you built to handle threat, and it’s been running things for so long that you’ve mistaken it for your identity.

What is the ego, really?

It isn’t arrogance or swagger. In its oldest sense, the ego is the part of the self that organized around a threat once survival stopped being pure reflex. It kept you alive, but it was never meant to be the whole man.