The Displacement of Self
When the Roles We Play Make Us Forget Who We Are
About This Essay
After three weeks traveling through Asia as a solo parent, I returned home with a renewed sense of clarity, agency, and self. But within days, that clarity began to fade—blurred by the familiar routines and unspoken dynamics of domestic life. This essay explores what it means to lose (and reclaim) a stable sense of self in the environments that shape us most, and why it’s so easy for people like me—sensitive, adaptive, and service-oriented—to slip into roles that don’t reflect who we truly are.
I woke up before sunrise, despite not setting an alarm. This is the hazard of crossing 13 time zones just a few days ago. I recently returned from a three-week adventure in Asia with my 13-year-old daughter. While I was away, spring blossomed into full summer in Washington, D.C.
Outside my bay windows, I see the muted colors of predawn light reflecting off rain puddles from the night before. Brilliant hues of green and yellow wave in the breeze as birds sing their morning songs and dance in and out of the leaves of hickory, sweetgum, and maple trees. I also notice something else that wasn’t there when I left three weeks ago: weeds.
There are lots and lots of weeds.
Today is Saturday—a day that often means arduous work in my world: cleaning gutters, mowing the lawn, trimming hedges. Maintenance tasks. The mandatory work that keeps a house running. They’re not the kinds of things that garner applause or even appreciation. They’re just necessary things no one notices unless they’re neglected—like yesterday, when my passing neighbor casually remarked, Looks like perfect weather for yard work tomorrow!
Thanks, Captain Subtlety… Message received: loud and clear.
Because it’s my first Saturday back home in nearly a month, and the yard has exploded with new growth, I fully expect to spend most of the day hot and sweaty.
For the moment, I sit and enjoy this brief time alone in silence that is broken only by the sounds of birds outside, the purr of a cat beside me, and the typing of keys on my laptop. My coffee steams its dark aromas into the air and invites me to pause and sip its warmth from time to time.
And although this moment is beautiful in its simplicity, I can’t help but feel something quietly unpleasant stirring inside me—something nagging, somewhere between a hangnail and a hemorrhoid.
Beside me sits a list of chores—many of which didn’t get done while I was out of town. Some are tasks that others in my family could have done while I was gone, but didn’t—an enduring struggle of parenting teenagers that will likely only resolve once they have their own property value to worry about.
Other items fall to me by default, not because I’m the only one willing, but because I’m the only one able—whether due to experience, physical strength, or a combination of both. Jacking up the lawnmower and replacing a tire, diagnosing a faulty bumper mechanism and restringing the weed eater, and replacing a fuel filter on the leaf blower all fall into that category.
I don’t begrudge the reality. I am who I am and have the capabilities I have. They are who they are, with the capabilities they have. That’s how domestic partnership often works. Deciding who does what follows a kind of decision tree: it starts with preference, moves to willingness, and ends with capability. And while I’d much rather spend the day in other pursuits—writing this essay, playing piano, taking a nap—practical realities and a dash of neighbor-shame dictate how my day will be spent today.
So why the irritability?
From Solo to Duet
Have you ever found yourself doing all the right things—checking the boxes, fulfilling the role—and still feeling like something vital is missing?
I’ve felt it creeping in for days, but it announced itself clearly last night. We got home close to 10 p.m. after a full day of activities, and everyone scattered into their bedtime routines. I wiped down the counters, started the dishwasher, turned off lights room by room, brushed my teeth, knocked out my Duolingo streak, and climbed into bed.
Meanwhile, I watched my wife transform into a benevolent domestic whirlwind, gliding through the house like Mary Poppins on a tactical parenting mission. She tended to each child like a seasoned triage nurse:
Did you notice I washed your sheets? Please make your bed. And no, sleeping on the raw mattress under the pile of sheets like a raccoon is not a valid alternative.
You have a headache? Here’s ibuprofen. And acetaminophen for later. And just in case, here’s a color-coded spreadsheet for all your potential overnight analgesic needs.
Can someone feed the cats before they declare martial law? Whoever made me read that article about cats eating their owners was bad. Now I sleep with one eye open.
It was an impressive thing to watch, really. She is a great mother; always has been. But her proficiency and expertise left little for me to do in terms of parenting. And as I watched all the motion and management from the sidelines, I felt the edge of something—an ache I couldn’t quite name.
Not resentment.
Not envy, exactly.
Just… displacement.
A Subtle Shift
Days ago I was solely responsible for the full-time care and feeding of my daughter, 24/7 as we traversed a foreign continent. Every decision, from what we’d eat to how we’d navigate unfamiliar cities, fell to me. And though the days were long and often unpredictable, they carried a quiet clarity.
My role was self-evident. I was the parent, the protector, the guide. I didn’t need to negotiate my value in the ecosystem—I simply belonged, with purpose. Have you ever had a time in life like that—when the clarity of your role left no room for doubt, and purpose flowed effortlessly through each day? It’s a great thing to experience.
Since returning home, that role—and the quiet clarity that came with it—has diffused into something far more ambiguous. Here, I’m not needed in quite the same way. My wife is such a capable, intuitive mother that most of the emotional and practical parenting roles are handled before I even notice they’re needed. What remains are the manual labor tasks: fixing things, hauling things, keeping up the yard. Important, yes—but not fulfilling in the same way. Not in the way that made me feel alive.
And because I’ve spent most of my life defaulting to deference to others in order to keep peace and ‘make things work,’ I tend to shrink back into auxiliary mode, unsure of what is mine to claim.
I read something the other day about this very thing, how people-pleasers start out as parent-pleasers. Many of us who grew up in unstable and variable households learned to adapt to the needs of others as a survival mechanism—a way of controlling an environment that always felt tenuous and unsteady.
What we never learned, however, was how to stand up for ourselves and assert our needs, maybe even how to identify and articulate those needs, even to ourselves. When we find ourselves in partnerships, it is quite common to find frustration and discontent because we have become human Gumby dolls, adapting to whatever to make things work, dying slowly inside from the slow erosion of self that comes when your shape is always determined by someone else’s needs.
We become experts in flexibility, in smoothing the edges, in filling in the gaps others leave behind—but not in recognizing our own boundaries. We get so good at blending in, at staying useful and agreeable, that when asked what we actually want or need, we hesitate. Not because we’re hiding it, but because we genuinely don’t know. The muscle of self-advocacy has atrophied from disuse.
So instead of feeling valued for who we are, we’re quietly haunted by the suspicion that we’re only as worthy as our ability to accommodate. And when the environment changes—when the needs shift or the structure dissolves—we’re left unmoored. Listless. Not because there’s nothing to do, but because we’ve lost the internal compass that once pointed to selfhood.
Since returning home from Asia, my environment has changed, and with it, the clarity of my purpose. I am still needed, but less explicitly, and in a format that doesn’t feel as fulfilling. I am still valued, but less vividly. And that shift—from vital to peripheral, from author to co-editor—has led to a very unpleasant reality that I have lost something vital:
A stable sense of self.
The Right Kind of Connection
I have already shared my opinion that many fathers miss out on the same character building opportunities in parenting as mothers. This is often because traditional roles keep fathers occupied with tasks that resemble chores, while mothers—even working mothers—are more likely to be the full-time caregivers of children. Although mowing lawns or fixing hedge trimmers is infinitely easier than caring for children, the benefits of parenting are immensely more valuable to a person’s sense of purpose. This is because the kind of purpose that comes from the feeding of children, caring for them when they need a listening ear, and investing quality time to develop their characters—when pursued effectively—offers lasting relationships that flourish. In contrast, my lawn mower only offers one purpose once fixed—more sweaty work.
And since assuming the role of homeschooling dad and manager of the household more than a year ago, I have rediscovered my deep, intrinsic orientation toward meaning-making through connection, care, and cultivation of people, not just things. The more time I spend transporting kids to dentist appointments, preparing meals, or caring for them in the early hours of the night, the stronger my sense of self becomes, a sense of self that was lacking in my life before. And when that sense of self is eroded, it’s as if the oxygen has been drained from the room—leaving me disoriented, untethered, and gasping for purpose.
And this is actually a dynamic I have experienced before.
Redefining and Realigning Purpose
In 2012, after seven years as a Navy Corpsman (medic) working with the Marine Corps, I was commissioned as an Aerospace Experimental Psychologist. Put simply, my new job was to serve as a scientist in uniform—helping the Navy plan for the future by using research to develop new tools and technologies.
Although I often complained about my old job—like sleeping on frozen ground or being the go-to guy for treating STDs—being a Corpsman gave me something I deeply missed after becoming a scientist: a clear, immediate sense of purpose. It’s not that my new role lacked meaning, but the kind of direct impact I once felt from setting broken bones or suturing open wounds was replaced by something far more abstract and distant.
Most successful scientific contributions are like grains of sand—small, necessary, but often invisible in the final result. Few of us ever see exactly how our work shaped the elaborate sandcastle, we just know it’s in there somewhere.
For the first few years of being a scientist, I wrestled with that ambiguity. I felt adrift, like nothing I did really mattered. Futility crept in. I often lapsed into cynicism, struggling to find the motivation to write another grant proposal, knowing that even if it were successful, the outcome would likely be just another interesting finding—pointing to more questions, more work, and still no clear solution.
Over the years, in order to rediscover a meaningful purpose in my work as a scientist, I had to adjust my expectations and ways of thinking. I had to adopt a longer view of my work, and accept that the payoffs of my research might never materialize in as clear a manner as I wished. Meanwhile, I also redefined my role as a scientist in ways that made more sense for me.
Rather than focusing solely on generating findings and publishing papers as metrics for success, I focused on things that emphasized relationships and connection with other people, like mentoring graduate students, supervising interns, and collaborating with post-docs. These activities were the ones that made me really feel alive in my work because they activated the parts of me that crave connection, growth, and mutual transformation.
I learned that I care more about developing people, not just projects.
Returning to Center
Three weeks as a solo parent in Asia showed me what my true self looks like in full focus. The clarity and purpose I felt weren’t about the place—they were about who I became when I stopped shrinking into roles that didn’t fit.
So my irritation this morning isn’t really about gender roles or who does what around the house. Someone has to mow the lawn—this essay isn’t going to get it done.
What is irritating me this morning is myself.
I am irritated at how quickly I can allow myself to shrink and diminish, often as a means of keeping the peace or managing others in a household. I am saddened to see that even after all these years, my old habits continue to pull me off center, into roles that are ill-fitting and that lead to me having less clarity and less sense of identity.
The problem is me. My partner is not to blame. So the solution to this problem—a problem of my own making—is therefore straightforward.
I need to speak up more often and advocate for myself.
I need to preserve roles that fit, that allow me to be my most authentic self.
In my particular case, I need to be willing to say, “Hey, I want to be more involved with the kids.” Acts of care—bedtime check-ins, tough conversations, making space for emotion—are not just things I’m willing to do. They’re things I need to do because they reflect my truest self.
I don’t need to dominate the house. But I also don’t need to disappear into it.
I don’t need to slide into default roles that diminish my agency and ultimately make me feel more like a role and less like a person.
Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do? Build a life that reflects who we really are—not just the roles we’ve inherited. We want to be the people we’re becoming.
What I found, far from home, wasn’t a new identity.
It was me. Plain old me. Sensitive. Purposeful. Eager for connection.
Willing and able to mow the lawn, but only after a few honest words.
About the Author
ES Vorm, PhD is a Navy Aerospace Experimental Psychologist and longtime student of what makes us tick—especially under stress, uncertainty, and transformation. After two decades of serving as a scientist in uniform, he now devotes his time to full-time homeschooling, deep writing, and building a life grounded in purpose, presence, and personal growth. His essays explore the intersections of identity, giftedness, trauma, recovery, and family life with a voice that is both emotionally raw and intellectually precise. When he’s not writing or chasing his children through airports, you can find him journaling at dawn, sipping strong coffee, and trying (with varying success) to fix whatever’s broken in the backyard.