Self-image is the picture or account you hold of yourself: your qualities, limitations, appearance, abilities and what kind of person you believe you are.
It can help you recognise continuity. It can also make new information feel like a threat.
What happens when the independent one needs company?
Perhaps the need is ordinary. Perhaps admitting it feels extraordinary because it doesn’t fit the image you’ve learned to value.
You don’t need to declare your independence false. You may need a self-image roomy enough to include an actual human week.
The Hidden Hero’s Journey explores identity through the domain House. Its imagined rooms let you consider the roles you inhabit with different people and which parts of experience have become difficult to express.
The point isn’t to choose a better-looking identity. It’s to notice what an existing picture leaves out, including needs, preferences and possibilities that deserve to be met.
Identity considers the broader sense of self. Narrative identity looks at the stories that keep the picture familiar even when life has changed.
Dan P. McAdams’s Self and Identity, published by Noba, explains roles, goals and life stories as different dimensions of selfhood. It is a useful companion to a self-description that has become too tidy.