The question of who am I? is more slippery than it looks. We often define ourselves by roles—student, worker, parent, friend—or by traits we’ve been told we have: smart, quiet, creative, practical. But identity isn’t fixed. It shifts, grows, and sometimes surprises us. One of the most powerful ways to explore it is through art. When you create, you bypass the neat labels and let parts of yourself emerge that words alone can’t always capture.

Psychologically, this matters because so much of who we are lives below the surface. The subconscious speaks in images, symbols, and metaphors—the same language that art naturally uses. When you paint a stormy sea, sketch a fragmented face, or even just doodle absentmindedly, you may be expressing something your rational mind hasn’t caught up with yet. Art makes the invisible visible. It lets us test out possibilities of self, hold them up to the light, and ask, is this me? -  it’s a mirror into the self.

The process is often more important than the product. It’s not about producing something beautiful, but about noticing what comes out when you stop filtering yourself. That strange color combination you reach for, the repeated shapes that keep showing up, the themes that appear again and again—they’re like fingerprints of your inner world. Over time, they sketch a portrait of identity that’s more honest than the stories we tell ourselves.

In that sense, art isn’t just self-expression—it’s self-discovery. Each act of creation is a small experiment in being. And through those experiments, you might realize you’re braver, more playful, or more complex than you thought. Over time, art helps you see that you’re not just one fixed story—you’re many, shifting and alive. And perhaps that’s the greatest discovery: that your identity, like your art, is always in the making.