I’ve been thinking a lot lately about narrative, about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The other night, my girlfriend and I were talking about my kids, and she asked whether I primarily thought of myself as a dad. I thought about it for a moment, and realized that I don’t think I really have a primary identity right now.

There are a lot of ways that I’ve described myself over the years, a lot of roles that I’ve inhabited. My bio on most social media platforms says something like “writer, photographer, and podcaster,” and those are certainly all ways that I think of myself. I am also a father, yes, and a son. A brother, a cousin, a grandson, a nephew, a friend. I used to call myself an activist, and more recently have been calling myself a former activist, and perhaps in the not-too-distant future I’ll just be an activist again. But the way I mainly understood myself for most of my life was as a husband. All of those other things were true of me, but they all took a back seat in one way or another to being my then-wife’s partner. I haven’t been a husband for more than three years now, but I’m realizing that a lot of the discontent and the strange floating feeling I’ve been having is due to the fact that the way I think of myself hasn’t stabilized yet.

Realistically, none of us actually has a single authentic self, because there is neither a single self (at any given moment, many different facets of our being exist and conflict and surface and recede simultaneously) nor a stable self (while we live, we are always changing). The idea of a central, unifying identity is just a story we tell ourselves. And yet, I say “just,” but stories are real and powerful even if they are imaginary, no? Having a stable story about yourself makes it easier to find meaning and purpose, to know why you do the things you do. And it’s understandable that lacking that story would be unsettling.

It’s strange to still be figuring all this stuff out, three years on. But then, I suspect that you never really stop having to learn and re-learn. I don’t know what it would take to find something new to hang my sense of self on, nor what it would look like. Maybe that’s not something that’s going to happen, at least not in the same way. Maybe that’s okay.