How structure
is formed

Before a new structure can hold, the old one has to be allowed to end.

Substack

The old skeletal system must die.

You are the only one who is still holding onto it.

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Identity is a structure

Read that again. Identity looks like a fact about you but behaves like a building. It has foundations, load bearing walls, and rooms that keep getting added. You keep extending the space, making add ons and buying new furniture or painting the walls to make it look different.

It was assembled out of your beliefs, your experiences and the environments you lived through, and most of it went up while you were busy living and never approving the draft plans.

Think of every label you were ever handed. Extrovert. Introvert. The responsible one. The creative one. The difficult one. You may carry versions of those traits. But the repetition of a label makes it more solid. The more you hear it, the more you align with it, not always because it is true, but because the reinforcement made it feel true. And what feels true starts to run like code.

It runs underneath the choices you make before you have thought about them. Which rooms you walk into and which ones you decline. What you put your hand up for and what you assume was meant for somebody else. A description said often enough becomes an instruction, and an instruction followed long enough becomes structure.

The same holds for the systems you choose on purpose. Take astrology. You can hold it at arm's length, a conversation piece, a personality shorthand, something to laugh about with friends. Or you can go deeper. Follow the daily patterns. Let the framework shape how you interpret what happens to you. Both are valid. What matters is that you are the one setting the depth rather than inheriting it by default.

Once you can look at identity as a structure rather than as the truth about who you are, it becomes something you can survey. You can see which parts are load bearing, which parts were added by someone else, and which parts are still carrying weight they were only ever meant to hold you for a while.

This is not an argument against popular or collective frameworks. It is about being able to identify which ones you want to hold as your own. Knowing which systems you are inside, why you are inside them, and what each one is doing to your picture of yourself is the difference between running a structure and being run by one.

How easily an identity is formed

I created these two simple and easy examples of how we can identify with a structure that already exists. I tried to use something a little out of the ordinary so that it is not one of the tools that you can use anywhere else. You see, I tried to find some lesser known structures and created something where I could find a way to identify with it.

One is based on the Mayan Tzolkin system and the BaZi Four Pillars using your birth date only.
The other is built from archetypes I created out of your answers to questions and common patterns merged with the aspects of the Enneagram.

Enter your birth date into the Identity Architect tool and it will run through two systems that have been reading dates for thousands of years. The Mayan Tzolkin returns a day sign, a tone and a colour, along with a kin number. And the BaZi Four Pillars returns the element you run on. Wood, fire, earth, metal or water.

The Archetype Field came out of watching how people hold themselves together, including me. I wrote twelve names for the states I kept seeing. Someone whose defining injury became the operating system. Someone using achievement as armour. Someone who dissolved into a role and forgot which parts were theirs. Someone performing being fine. Someone who burned it all down on purpose. Fifteen questions place you against all twelve, and underneath that sit the nine Enneagram engines, the motivation below the behaviour.

Use these tools and see what answers you get. Do you relate to what comes back?

Note that we do not save any of this information.

Try one or both.

Whether the answers are relevant or not, does that mean you have to hold yourself to that outcome as a permanent idea of who you are? No. These are only tools to help you navigate life. Use them for as long as you need, then let them go. Or create your own, as I did.

The reason I share them here is to show you that you can use anything to create a solidification of who you think you are. Once you realise that, you will never look at a system the same way again, and you will have the confidence to build your own.

Then there is shadow

Now that you understand structure, you need to look at shadow. Where structure presents outward, shadow is inward. I have used both of these together to create many frameworks for myself.

Twelve foundations carried in the ribs. Nine emotional frequencies. Seven versions of self. Three recalibration protocols. Every one of them started as something lived and became something usable.

Where you go next is your choice.

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