Finding my identity by Andrew Bunt

The embarrassing story of how I found my best identity.

In my mid-20s I had a rather embarrassing identity crisis. I was in a bad way and my mental health was spiralling. Through the encouragement of some friends, I began to see a counsellor. As my counsellor and I explored what was going on for me, we discovered that one issue was my sense of self. Though I hadn’t realised it, I was living with an unhealthy and destructive sense of self: I thought I was a freak and weirdo whom no one really liked and no one loved.

You might think that sounds sad but not necessarily embarrassing. But what I haven’t told you is that I had already published a book about identity. I written about who God says we are in Christ, that we are adopted and loved, but here I was unable to believe that anyone, including God, loved me. It was a sobering moment when I saw what was going on. It made me realise how easy it is to know something but not to experience it. As I sought to address the situation in which I’d ended up, I learnt the importance of thinking about how we form identity – asking not just ‘Who am I?’, but the prior question, ‘How do I find who I am?’. I also learnt that experiencing our identity requires deliberate, active steps.

This experience is one of the reasons I’ve written my new book, Finding Your Best Identity: A short Christian introduction to identity, sexuality and gender. My suspicion is that many of us Christians may know who we are and yet not be experiencing that truth. Through exploring different ways that identity is formed in the world around us and the Bible’s better approach, and through thinking about the active steps we can take to experience who we are, I hope the book will equip people to find their best identity.

My experience in my mid-20s hasn’t actually been my only identity crisis. I’ve wrestled with who I am as a man – concluding at one point in my childhood that I must be a girl trapped in a boy’s body and continuing to feel uncomfortable in my identity as a man for many years after that. I’m also a guy who is same-sex attracted, an experience that has also forced me to wrestle with the question ‘Who am I?’. But I’ve found that understanding a biblical approach to identity equips me to best handle my experience of gender and sexuality. In Finding Your Best Identity, I seek to show how biblical identity allows us to see the good news of God’s plan for our experiences of gender and sexuality.

The topics of identity, sexuality and gender are prominent in both our personal human experience and in wider culture. My hope is that anyone who reads Finding Your Best Identity will be helped to think and live biblically in these areas and to enjoy finding and living out who they really are. Preachers will find in the book a model of how we can seek to connect with where people are at by tackling questions that are central to human experience, engaging and critiquing the ideas of our culture, and casting the biblical picture in a way which allows its goodness and beauty to shine through.

Andrew Bunt
Andrew studied theology at Durham University and King’s College London and is Emerging Generations director at Living Out, www.livingout.org. Twitter @AndrewBunt.
Finding Your Best Identity: A short Christian introduction to identity, sexuality and gender by Andrew Bunt was published on 18 November 2022 and is available as an ebook from IVP here https://ivpbooks.com/finding-your-best-identity
Paperback (low stock) from Eden here https://www.eden.co.uk/christian-books/personal-life/sexuality/finding-your-best-identity/