Essay

Where Identity Actually Comes From

What if the thing you thought would define this season of your life suddenly changes? A relationship ends. A job does not work out. Marriage is taking longer than you expected. You make a choice you regret. Or maybe the questions feel even more personal: What if I do not like my body? What if I am struggling with my faith, my sexuality, my family, or my future? Does any of that change who I really am?

Those are sincere questions, especially during years when so much of life can still feel unsettled. The restored gospel gives you somewhere steady to begin. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that you are a “beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents” with “a divine nature and destiny.” Your identity began before your current circumstances. You lived with Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother before coming to earth, and mortality is part of an eternal purpose in which you can become more like Them through Jesus Christ.

That gives you a different way to understand everything else about yourself. Your relationships, abilities, experiences, questions, weaknesses, feelings, and choices all matter, but none of them tells the whole story of who you are. God has already revealed something deeper about both your origin and your future.

What Moses Learned About Who He Was

Moses 1 gives a remarkable picture of why knowing that matters.

Moses had just stood in the presence of God. Heavenly Father repeatedly called him “my son,” showed him His creations, and told him, “I have a work for thee.” Moses came away from that experience understanding two truths at the same time: compared with the greatness of God, he was small and completely dependent upon Him, but he was also God’s son, known personally and given a purpose.

Then Satan appeared and addressed him very differently: “Moses, son of man.” Moses certainly was mortal, so Satan used a description that contained some truth. But it left out the greater truth God had just taught him. Moses answered, “For behold, I am a son of God.” Because Moses had first learned from God who he was, he could recognize an explanation of himself that was incomplete.

You may experience something similar in quieter ways. You fail a class, and after a while I failed begins turning into I am a failure. Someone you love leaves, and you start wondering whether that says something permanent about your worth. You are still single while friends are marrying, and without meaning to, you begin treating your relationship status as evidence about the future God has for you. A struggle with pornography, your body, same-sex attraction, doubt, loneliness, anxiety, or regret can become so consuming that it starts to feel like the most important thing about you.

Moses’s experience invites you to begin somewhere else: with what God has revealed first.

Priscilla Shirer: Finding Her Identity in Christ

Christian teacher Priscilla Shirer has described having to learn this in her own life. In her first-person account of finding her identity in Christ, she talks about learning to make her faith her own and to understand herself through her relationship with Jesus Christ rather than allowing other voices to have the final word about who she was:

Her experience points to something worth noticing. Knowing your identity in God is not mainly an exercise in finding a better label for yourself. It changes where you turn for the deepest answers about your life and what kind of person you are trying to become.

So Who Are You, Really?

Speaking specifically to young adults, President Russell M. Nelson asked that question in “Choices for Eternity.” He taught that three identities should have priority over the many other ways we describe ourselves: a child of God, a child of the covenant, and a disciple of Jesus Christ.

President Nelson was not suggesting that your personality, family, culture, work, relationships, abilities, or struggles are meaningless. In that same teaching, he acknowledged many legitimate labels from his own life. His point was about order: no other description should displace the eternal identities God has revealed.

And notice where those identities lead. Being a child of God tells you where you came from and whose image you bear. Being a child of the covenant tells you that God invites you into binding promises with Him. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ tells you how you move forward. Divine identity is meant to shape the person you are becoming.

That kind of becoming is possible because of Jesus Christ. You do not simply discover that you are God’s child and then remain unchanged. As you exercise agency, repent, receive His grace, make and keep covenants, and follow Him, Christ helps you gradually become more like the Heavenly Parents whose child you already are.

Why Other Ways of Defining Yourself Can Feel So Persuasive

There is an understandable reason modern messages about creating or defining your own identity can be appealing. Most of us do not want other people deciding our worth for us. If you have been misunderstood, judged by your appearance, limited by someone else’s expectations, or reduced to a mistake or struggle, being told that you alone can determine who you are may feel freeing.

But that idea can leave God out of the question.

A career, relationship, diagnosis, accomplishment, personality trait, or struggle may describe something real about your mortal experience. The difficulty comes when one part of your experience begins carrying more authority than it can bear. Comparison can make someone else’s life the measure of your worth. Shame can turn a sin that should lead you toward repentance into a conclusion that you cannot change. Even success can become confusing if being attractive, accomplished, admired, or wanted becomes the place you depend upon most for a sense of worth.

This is one way Satan distorts identity. He does not always need to persuade you to believe something entirely false. As he did with Moses, sometimes an incomplete description is enough. If he can get you to concentrate so completely on one mortal circumstance, desire, achievement, or failure that you forget what God revealed first, that smaller description can begin directing choices that belong under the authority of your divine identity and covenants.

The answer is not to pretend those parts of your life are unimportant. It is to put them in their proper place.

Your Family Story Can Help You See a Larger Picture

Research suggests that knowing more about the lives of people who came before you may also help you develop a stronger sense of identity.

In the 2025 study “Family Stories About Parents as Resources for Young Adults’ Well-Being and Identity,” researchers studied 639 college-age adults across two samples and asked them about stories they knew from their parents’ lives. Most could readily recall stories about their parents, often stories that helped them understand their parents better or taught lessons about life. Young adults whose memories of those stories were more vivid also tended to report stronger aspects of well-being and identity development. The study suggests that understanding those who came before us can help us make sense of our own lives.

There is something beautiful about that in light of the restored gospel. Learning your family history may help you recognize sacrifices that made your life possible, strengths you want to carry forward, or harmful patterns you want to change through Jesus Christ. Your earthly family may be loving and strong, complicated and painful, or some mixture of both. Either way, you can decide what you will receive from the past and what, with Christ’s help, you will build differently for the future.

That adds meaning to Malachi’s prophecy that the hearts of the children would turn to their fathers. Family history and temple work are about more than gathering names. They help bind generations together and remind you that your life belongs within a story stretching far beyond the present moment.

What If Parts of My Life Still Feel Complicated?

Knowing your divine identity does not make every difficult circumstance disappear. If you are single, divorced, carrying family wounds, experiencing same-sex attraction, struggling with your body, questioning what your future will look like, or trying to repent of choices you wish you had made differently, those things may require real faith and work.

But Heavenly Father knows the difference between circumstances you did not choose and choices for which you are responsible. You can seek help where you need it, repent where repentance is needed, develop better habits, repair relationships when possible, and continue moving forward. Faithful people will not lose eternal blessings because of circumstances outside their control.

Jesus Christ knows your complete life, not merely its hardest part. He can work within circumstances that are still unresolved while helping you become wiser, stronger, more faithful, and more capable of building something good.

A Few Questions Worth Thinking About

• Who or what has been shaping the way I see myself most strongly lately?
• Has one relationship, feeling, struggle, accomplishment, mistake, or label begun carrying more authority in my life than what God has revealed about me?
• If I really understood myself as a child of Heavenly Parents, a child of the covenant, and a disciple of Jesus Christ, what might that change about the person I am trying to become?

A Few Things You Can Do This Week

Read your patriarchal blessing with one question in mind: What does Heavenly Father want me to understand about who I am and what He is helping me become? Write down anything you notice about identity, gifts, covenants, relationships, responsibilities, or your future.

Learn one family story you do not already know. Ask a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or another relative what life was like when they were your age, what tested their faith, or what they learned from an important decision. You might also spend some time in FamilySearch looking beyond names and dates to learn about one actual person.

Take one competing voice to Heavenly Father in prayer. Maybe it is comparison, regret, relationship status, your appearance, a sexual feeling, an accomplishment, or someone else’s opinion that has been carrying too much weight. Ask Him to help you understand that part of your life in light of what He has already revealed about your identity and then choose one action this week that reflects the disciple you want to become.

Jesus Christ knows who you were before this life, who you are now, and what you can become. Following Him does not require you to ignore the complicated parts of mortality; it teaches you how to understand them without allowing them to determine the whole direction of your life. As you listen to what God has revealed, keep your covenants, repent when needed, and make faithful choices, your divine identity can become more than something reassuring you know. It can give direction to the life you are building and help you become, through the grace of Jesus Christ, more like the Heavenly Parents whose child you have always been.