Take away your job, your role, your name — who exactly is left?

The most useful response to all this isn't a belief to adopt. It's a question to keep asking. In the last century a quiet teacher in south India offered it in its barest form: when any thought or trouble arises, don't argue with it — turn around and ask, 'to whom does this come? to me. then who am I?' He called it simply the inquiry 'ko'ham' — who am I — and treated it not as a riddle to solve with the mind but as a torch you point back at the one holding it.

The method is gentle and strict at once. You are restless — fine: who is aware of the restlessness? You feel like a failure — who is the one noticing that feeling? Each time, the answer you reach for ('I am this, I am that') is just another label, another object you can observe. So you set it down and ask again. You are not trying to manufacture a grand answer. You are noticing, by elimination, that everything you can point to is something you have, not the one who has it.

This is the same instinct the forest sages followed and the same one a curious child has at the edge of sleep — but turned into a daily practice. The 'players' here are not famous names. They are a question, and the one quietly behind your eyes who has been there the whole time, watching every label come and go.

The first misreading is that 'finding yourself' means landing on a better label — a cooler job, a spiritual title, a tidy phrase for your bio. But that just swaps one costume for another and leaves the real confusion untouched. The whole point is to see that you are the one wearing costumes, not any single costume. Adding a nicer label is not the answer; it's the very habit being questioned.

The second is that this means your roles don't matter — that you should quit the job, drop the duties, float above ordinary life. Not at all. The sheaths are real; the work is real; being a good parent, a steady colleague, a decent neighbour matters enormously. The Gita never tells Arjuna to leave the battlefield of life. It tells him to act fully while knowing he is more than any one part he plays. You hold the role properly precisely because you are no longer terrified of losing it.

The third is that asking 'who am I?' is morbid navel-gazing, a way to escape responsibility. In practice it does the opposite. A person who isn't desperately propping up one fragile label is freer, kinder, harder to threaten, easier to be around. The inquiry doesn't pull you out of life. It loosens the grip of fear so you can finally be in it.

Here is the move that turns a crisis into a teacher. When a label is suddenly stripped — the job, the role, the relationship — most of us rush to plug the hole with a new one as fast as possible, just to make the panic stop. But that panic is information, and it is pointing somewhere useful. Instead of running from it, you can ask the simple, almost rude question: the one who feels lost right now — who is that?

Try to actually find that one and something curious happens. Whatever you catch hold of — 'I'm the person who lost the job', 'I'm afraid', 'I'm nobody now' — is a thought you are watching. But the watcher keeps slipping behind the thought. You can never turn around fast enough to see it as an object, because it is the one doing the seeing. The eye sees the room but cannot see itself; the seer is never the seen.

That slipperiness is not failure. It is the answer in the only form it can take. The labels were always things you could observe — and therefore things you could lose. The one observing them was never on the menu. So the loss that felt like erasure turns out to have left the essential thing completely untouched. You did not lose yourself. You lost a description of yourself, and got a quiet chance to meet the one underneath who was never up for grabs.

This isn't a young person's puzzle to solve once and shelve. Life is, in a way, a long series of labels being handed to us and then taken back — student, professional, partner, parent, and one day the slow letting-go of even health and role and name. Every one of those handovers can feel like a small death if we believed the label was the self. Or each can become a quiet reminder of the obvious thing we keep forgetting: we are the one the labels happened to, not the labels.

That is why this old question matters, and matters more, not less, as the years go on. It doesn't make you cold toward your roles; it makes you steady inside them. The person who knows they are more than their job does the job better and bleeds less when it ends. The aim was never to despise the costumes. It was to stop confusing them with the one wearing them.

And the first step is small enough to take today. The next time you catch yourself shrinking into a single label — 'I'm just a…', 'I'm nothing without…' — pause and ask, lightly, without needing an answer: who is the one saying that? You won't get a tidy reply, and you're not supposed to. The asking itself loosens the knot. Held a little less tightly, even an identity crisis turns out to be an invitation home.