For most of my life, I never really had to think much about my identity. I knew who I was, or at least I thought I did. I was a son, a brother, a husband, a friend, a photographer, a coworker, a father, and a dozen other things depending on where I was and who I was with. Each role came with its own expectations, responsibilities, and even its own version of me.

But somewhere along the way, something happened that I never really noticed. The word “I” slowly became “we.”

It wasn’t something that happened overnight. There wasn’t a specific moment when I stopped being one person and became part of two. It happened gradually, as most important things do. Decisions became our decisions. Plans became our plans. Friends became our friends. Holidays became our holidays. Even something as simple as deciding what to have for dinner became something that belonged to both of us. There was nothing wrong with that. In fact, there was something really wonderful about it.

When you spend more than three decades building a life with someone, your identities naturally become intertwined. You learn each other’s habits, moods, preferences, dreams, fears, and all of those little things that make someone who they are. Eventually, you stop thinking about where one person ends and the other begins. The lines become blurred, and that doesn’t feel strange. It feels comfortable. It feels like home.

Then the earthquake happens.

When everything you’ve built shifts beneath your feet, you discover something you weren’t prepared for. You don’t just lose a person. You lose pieces of yourself that were connected to that person.

For a while, I found myself asking questions I hadn’t needed to ask in decades. What do I want? What do I like? Where do I want to go? Who are my friends? What does my future look like? They sound like simple questions, but they aren’t when you’ve spent most of your adult life answering them as part of a “we.”

That’s one of the strange things about losing someone you’ve spent so much of your life with. You don’t just have to learn how to live without them. You have to learn how to live as yourself again.

And honestly, that can be surprisingly uncomfortable.

There are parts of my identity that I know have always been there. My sense of humor, my curiosity, my love of photography, my tendency to communicate through writing, my desire to understand people, and my willingness to help. There are also the strange little things about me that probably don’t make much sense to anyone else. Those things didn’t disappear.

But other parts of me had become so intertwined with being a husband that I don’t really know what they look like without that role. For so long, being a husband wasn’t something I thought about. It was simply who I was.

Now I have to figure out who I am without it.

I think that’s part of what makes this stage of life so difficult. There are days when I feel like I know exactly who I am, and other days when I realize I’m still trying to figure it out. Sometimes I catch myself doing something and think, “That’s me.” Other times, I wonder whether something is genuinely part of who I am or whether it became part of me because of the life I built with someone else.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing.

I’ve started to think that perhaps identity isn’t something we discover once and then carry with us for the rest of our lives. Maybe it changes as we do. We become sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends, partners, parents, coworkers, mentors, caregivers, and countless other things throughout our lives. Each experience leaves something behind. Some things become permanent parts of us. Other things serve their purpose for a while and then fade away.

Sometimes we don’t get to choose when that happens. But eventually, we do get to choose what comes next. That’s the part I’m still learning.

For a long time, I think I confused the loss of a relationship with the loss of myself. I looked at the empty spaces in my life and assumed they meant something was missing from me. Maybe some things are missing. There is no pretending otherwise. But missing someone and being missing myself are two very different things.

I’m still here. And maybe that’s where evolution begins.

Not by becoming somebody completely different, but by taking another look at the person who is still here and figuring out what comes next. Some parts of me probably need to stay in the past. Some parts need to be rediscovered. There are probably things I carried for years that I no longer need to carry. And there may be parts of me that never had much room to exist before.

That last thought is actually pretty exciting.

After spending so much time thinking about what I’ve lost, I’m beginning to realize that there are still things I haven’t discovered about myself. I don’t have to recreate the life I had, and I don’t have to become the person I was before. I certainly don’t have to pretend that everything I’ve experienced hasn’t changed me. It has.

Maybe the goal isn’t to find my old identity. Maybe the goal is to understand my new one.

I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet. I’m still figuring it out. But for the first time in a very long time, I have the opportunity to ask myself what I want, what matters to me, and who I want to become.

And perhaps that’s what identity really is. Not knowing exactly who you are, but being willing to keep discovering who you’re becoming.

“.. the rest is still unwritten.”