I recently started reading Being Bad by Arielle Egozi. It made me think about something much bigger than the idea of being “good” or “bad.”

It made me wonder how much of our identity is actually ours.

From the moment we’re born, we’re surrounded by invisible instructions. This is what a boy should be. This is what a girl should be. This is what success looks like. This is what love looks like. This is the right career. This is the right family. This is the right way to dress. This is the right way to behave. This is what people your age should want.

Nobody hands us a book filled with rules. The rules simply become the air we breathe. They are repeated by our families, our schools, our cultures, our friends, films, advertising and social media until they stop looking like opinions and start feeling like reality.

We’re told that life is about discovering who we are. But before we even begin that journey, someone has already drawn the map. We follow it for years without even realising it isn’t nature. It’s culture. It’s expectation. It’s habit. Sometimes it’s fear disguised as certainty.

We’re free to choose… as long as we choose from the options we’ve been taught are acceptable.

And when we don’t, something interesting happens. People become uncomfortable. Not because we’re hurting anyone, but because we’ve stepped outside a story they believed was the only possible one.

Maybe that’s why so many people spend years wondering whether something is wrong with them, when perhaps the real question isn’t whether we fit the story, but who wrote it in the first place.

The most powerful rules are often the ones we mistake for reality.

Maybe becoming yourself isn’t about finding your identity. Maybe it’s about questioning the identity you inherited.

And maybe the bravest thing we can do isn’t breaking the rules. Maybe it’s asking whether those rules ever belonged to us.

If nobody had ever told you who you were supposed to be… who would you be today?