A line often attributed to Charles Bukowski asks whether you remember who you were before the world told you who to be.
I've been sitting with this question for months.
It sounds philosophical. It isn't. It's one of the most practical questions you'll wrestle with, especially if you've spent decades being good at wearing other people's definitions of you.
I have.
The Army Handed Me an Identity
I enlisted at 18. I didn't know who I was.
The Army solved this immediately.
Your identity arrived printed on two rows of text above your chest pocket. Your rank told people where you stood. Your unit told people what you were for. Your mission told people what you did. Every morning you woke up knowing exactly who you were, because someone had already decided, and you'd agreed to it when you signed.
Honestly? It felt like relief.
I'm not being cynical about this. The Army does it for a reason. Young men need structure. They need to belong to something bigger than themselves. They need to matter. The Army is ruthlessly good at providing all three.
It gave me discipline I didn't have. It gave me purpose I'd been missing. It gave me physical conditioning, leadership experience, and a tribe I'd have bled for.
But here's what I didn't notice: the Army wasn't supplementing my identity. It was replacing it. Not maliciously. Not even intentionally. It handed me a complete identity kit, and I put it on gratefully. Every day I wore it, it fit a little better. Every day I wore it, I forgot a little more about who I'd been before.
When I left the military, I took off the uniform and looked in the mirror. I didn't know who I was looking at.
The Void After the Uniform
Veterans talk about military transition. The conversation focuses on skills translation and resume writing. Useful stuff. Completely misses the point.
The hard part of leaving the military isn't finding a job. The hard part is losing an identity.
In the Army, you know exactly who you are every single morning. Outside, people ask what you do and wait for you to explain yourself. I found I had nothing useful to say.
So I did what seemed logical: I found another institution to hand me a definition.
Tech was perfect for this. Software engineering comes with its own uniform. Senior engineer. Tech lead. Engineering manager. Director. VP. Each title lands on your LinkedIn profile like a rank pinned to your chest. Each role brings its own vocabulary, its own expected behaviors, its own unwritten status hierarchy.
I was good at it. I moved up. I wore each new title well.
The tech industry has strong opinions about what a leader looks, sounds, and thinks like. I absorbed them. I read the books. I used the frameworks. I gave the talks. Over years I became a pretty convincing version of What A Senior Engineering Leader Is Supposed To Be.
For a long time, I told myself: this is who I am.
When the Costume Stops Fitting
Something shifts around mid-career. Not for everyone, but for a lot of people. You've proven yourself professionally. The titles look solid. The work is technically strong. And then, quietly, you start asking questions you've been too busy to consider.
Am I doing work I care about? Or am I performing the version of myself this role requires?
This question landed hard around my mid-forties.
My team respected me. The work was skilled. The role looked good from outside. But there was a persistent hollow feeling I didn't have a name for. Not burnout. Not dissatisfaction.
More like: I was playing a character named Ken Corey, Engineering Leader, and I'd been performing so long I'd forgotten what my own voice sounded like without the script.
I kept doing the job. I was good at it. But I started wondering whether being good at something was enough reason to keep going.
What I Found Underneath
The work of answering Bukowski's question is slower and stranger than I expected.
I started writing. Not for an audience. Not to build a platform. For the same reason you'd write in a journal at 3am when something is nagging at you. I needed to find out what I thought, separate from what my role expected me to think.
What I found wasn't a revelation. Something quieter.
I like building things. Not specifically software... I like the arc from nothing to something functional. The problem-becomes-solution shape. I've done this with code, with teams, with systems, with a paramotor training program my daughter and I went through in Spain. The specific medium matters less than I'd told myself.
I care about people. Not in the "human capital optimization" sense corporate culture trains into you. In the real sense. The person across the table in a one-on-one meeting matters. Their growth matters. Their frustration matters. For years I framed my interest in people as "leadership effectiveness." The honest framing: I like people and want good things for them.
I get angry about bad leadership. Not frustrated. Angry. Because bad leadership isn't an operational problem... it damages people. People with families and ambitions and mortgages who deserved better. My research found 99.5% of respondents had experienced at least one type of bad boss. Not a statistic. A near-universal wound.
None of this came from the Army. None of it came from tech. It was there at 18, waiting for someone to ask.
The Question Isn't About Going Back
Here's my pushback on the Bukowski framing: it sounds like it's asking you to reject who you've become.
It isn't.
I'm glad the Army gave me discipline and purpose. I'm glad tech gave me skills and perspective and a career I'm proud of. I don't want to strip all of it away and find some pristine 17-year-old underneath.
But I needed to know which parts of who I'd become were genuinely mine, and which parts were costumes I'd kept wearing past the point they served me.
The answer required discomfort. It required writing things I wasn't sure I believed, then testing them against experience. It required admitting some of what I'd built was performance... not fraudulent performance, but performance nonetheless.
It also required letting go of borrowed identities and building something more honest. Writing. Speaking. Working on what genuinely makes me angry, not on what makes a good leadership talk.
The Army shaped me. Tech shaped me. Neither is the whole story.
So. Who were you before the world got its hands on you?
If you haven't asked in a while, sit with the question. The discomfort is worth it.