Who Are You Beneath the Suit?

You are born into this world no different to any other animal. You are nature, born into nature.

But, as soon as you arrive, something intervenes. You get given your first suit. Your starter suit. The first few years of your life are the ones where the people closest to you attempt mould you into what they think you should be.

You should be well behaved.

You should share.

You should be kind.

You should be clever.

You should be seen and not heard.

Don’t answer back.

Stop crying.

“What a pretty little girl”

“What a smart young man”

We learn the foundational stuff about who we are and where we come from. We also start to become influenced in what is right and wrong, how things should be and how things shouldn’t be.

Those early years are where the stitching begins. Not by us, but by the hands around us — parents, teachers, relatives, society. We’re taught what earns a smile and what earns a frown. We’re praised for being “easy,” “quiet,” “good,” and corrected when our instincts don’t fit the script. Even our emotions get graded. Crying is discouraged, anger is punished, and needing comfort is labelled as weakness.

Some parents (including myself) are even told to leave their babies to cry, believing it builds strength. But a baby doesn’t stop crying because they’ve learned resilience; they stop because their nervous system has learned that no one is coming. These early moments become the first threads of our identity — not chosen, but inherited.

When the first suit becomes too small, we’re handed another — the school suit. It’s tailored for conformity, not comfort, and it carries us through those crucial years where fitting in often matters more than being ourselves.

During this time, you learn the laws of the playground. You realise that life isn’t all about you, as you have spent the previous years thinking it is. You might get hurt for the first time, someone might say something cruel about you, someone might laugh at you, someone might not share their toys with you, or let you play with them.

As you get older, the system gets more serious. You meet pressure. Pressure to do well, pressure to know who you are and what you want.

Be smart.

Study, study, study.

"Don't fall behind!"

"You need good grades if you want a good life!"

You get put into groups based on your “ability” to be good at maths and English. Maybe you’re sat on the Scuba Divers table — code for the “not so bright” kids. Maybe you’re placed with the Astronauts — the ones with “potential,” the ones teachers smile at a little longer.

It doesn’t matter if you’re good at music, or art, or if you spend your nights staring up at the stars imagining whole worlds. None of that counts. Only English and Maths matter. Only the things that can be measured, graded, compared.

And this is where you start to learn your worth. Not your real worth — the one you were born with — but the worth assigned to you by a system that values conformity over curiosity.

Will you go on to do great things? Or are you already “too stupid”?

These aren’t just questions you hear. They become questions you carry. They shape the way you see yourself long before you’re old enough to challenge them.

For years, you might walk around believing you’re less than, simply because of where you were told to sit. Because of how you were spoken to. Because of the expectations placed on you — or withheld from you.

When childhood ends, the next suit arrives: adolescence. It’s stiff, uncomfortable, full of expectations we don’t understand. And this is usually the moment we start to resent the suit itself; the version of us that others have built.

Suddenly, the world feels sharper. You become hyper‑aware of yourself, of how you look, how you sound, how you’re perceived. You start comparing yourself to everyone around you, trying to work out where you fit, or if you fit at all.

Why can’t I look more like her?

Why am I so spotty?

Why am I so flat chested?

Why am I so fat?

Why am I so stupid?

Nobody likes me.

Nobody likes this suit.

This is the age where the suit begins to chafe. You feel the weight of every expectation; to be confident but not arrogant, attractive but not “trying too hard,” unique but not too different.

You’re told to “be yourself,” yet every part of you is scrutinised, judged, corrected. So you start editing yourself. Shrinking the parts that feel too loud. Hiding the parts that feel too strange.

And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, you begin to lose sight of who you were before the suits. Before the labels. Before the world told you who you should be.

Adolescence becomes less about discovering yourself and more about surviving the version of you that others expect. The pressure to belong, to be liked, to be “normal,” becomes its own kind of armour... heavy, rigid, impossible to move freely in.

And yet, you keep wearing it. Because at that age, the fear of being exposed — of being seen without the suit — feels far more dangerous than the discomfort of wearing it.

And then, almost without warning, you’re handed the heaviest suit of all: Adulthood. There’s no ceremony, no moment where someone checks if you’re ready. One day you’re a teenager trying to make sense of yourself, and the next you’re expected to have answers, plans, direction.

This suit doesn’t just come with expectations; it comes with responsibility. Bills. Jobs. Relationships. Decisions that feel permanent. The pressure to “have it together,” even when you’re still carrying the confusion of every suit you’ve worn before.

You don’t step into adulthood as a blank slate. You step into it wearing every layer you’ve ever been given.

The childhood suit that taught you to be good.

The school suit that taught you your worth was measurable.

The adolescence suit that taught you to hide the parts of yourself that didn’t fit.

All of it comes with you.

So you move through the world shaped by beliefs you never chose. Beliefs about your value, your intelligence, your potential, your place in the world. You make decisions based on old stories. You enter relationships wearing armour that was built during childhood. You chase goals that were never yours to begin with.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, that knowing. A quiet, persistent sense that something isn’t right. That the life you’re living doesn’t quite feel like yours. That you’ve been performing for so long you’re not sure where the performance ends and you begin.

This is the moment many people mistake for failure, or crisis, or “not coping.”

But really, it’s the beginning of awakening.

The first tug at the threads. The first awareness that the suit you’ve been wearing all these years was never designed for the real you.

And once you feel that, once you notice the discomfort, the misalignment, the longing — you can’t unfeel it.

It becomes the start of something new. The beginning of unlearning. The slow, brave process of taking the suit off, layer by layer, and meeting yourself for the very first time.

We go through our lives wearing suits. Layer after layer. Some of us never question it. Some of us don’t even realise we’re wearing anything at all.

But deep down, there’s a knowing. A quiet, burning knowing that something isn’t right. A restlessness that whispers that life isn’t meant to feel this tight, this heavy, this scripted.

For me, that knowing shows up as feeling stuck. Trapped. Like I want to claw my way out of my own skin just to breathe again.

When you look at the world, you can’t help but wonder: Does it make sense that every other creature is born into freedom, yet humans have to grind just to survive? Does it make sense that we follow rules made by people who don’t follow them themselves? Does it make sense that invisible borders decide who is worthy and who is not? Does it make sense that the basic needs of billions are controlled by a tiny fraction of the population?

We’ve normalised the abnormal. We’ve accepted the unacceptable. We’ve mistaken conditioning for truth.

So what happens when you take the suit off? When you peel back the layers of expectation, fear, performance, and survival? When you strip away everything you were told to be?

What’s left then?

Who are you underneath it all — underneath the noise, the rules, the labels, the armour?

Who are you?