I Thought Following God Meant Losing Myself (But I Was Wrong)

I’ve always known who I am in Christ.

Or at least, that’s what I believed. I grew up in a Christian home where faith wasn’t something you chose, it was something you lived. Sunday mornings were filled with gospel music, and everything about my life was shaped by what it meant to follow God.

For a long time, I never questioned it. I didn’t stop to ask who I might be outside of that identity. My choices, my values, even my desires were all filtered through what I believed God wanted from me. But recently, I started to wonder. Is it possible to have an identity apart from my faith?

Can I still know God and also discover who I am beyond what I’ve been taught? Is there a part of me that I’ve never explored because I’ve always been trying to be who I thought I should be? These are uncomfortable questions to sit with. Because there have been moments where following God felt like losing parts of myself.

When Faith Starts to Feel Like Disappearing

I was taught to decrease so that He could increase. But somewhere along the way, it started to feel like I was disappearing completely. What I felt, what I wanted, what I was naturally drawn to, it all seemed secondary. The focus was always on becoming someone better, someone more pleasing to God. And the result?

I lost confidence in who I was. I found myself constantly trying to become someone else, someone I thought God would approve of while quietly disconnecting from who I actually was.

The Questions I Asked

So I started asking a different question. Not whether I could have an identity separate from God, but whether I had misunderstood what it meant to walk with Him. Because the more I reflected, the more I began to see something I hadn’t noticed before.

That following God was never meant to erase me. It was meant to involve me. Not a filtered version of myself or a perfected version. But the real, unedited version of who I am. My personality. My interests. My thoughts. My struggles. All of it. What if my identity isn’t something I have to set aside to follow God but something I bring with me as I walk with Him?

Bringing My Whole Self Into the Journey

That changed the way I began to see everything. Instead of trying to abandon parts of myself, I’m learning to bring them before Him. The things I enjoy. The way I think. Even the areas where I feel uncertain or not “good enough.”

Because if God created me, then who I am isn’t separate from Him. It’s where He begins His work. Following God isn’t about pretending to be someone you’re not. It’s not about hiding your struggles or forcing yourself into a version of holiness that feels distant and unnatural.

It’s a process, a transformation that happens over time, not by removing who you are, but by shaping it. There are days when I slip back into old thinking, where I feel like I need to fix myself first before I can come to God. Days when I question whether I’m doing enough or becoming enough.

But I’m starting to understand that growth doesn’t begin with pretending. It begins with honesty. With coming before God as I am and trusting that He knows what to do with every part of me. The strengths, the doubts and the things I’m still figuring out. I don’t have to separate myself from God to discover who I am. And I don’t have to lose myself to follow Him.

If anything, it’s in walking with Him that I begin to understand myself more clearly.

Not as someone I’m trying to become, but as someone He has already known all along.

© 2026 Sabina Kumi. Want more content like this? Explore more articles in Knowing God.