According to Osho, you don't feel you are yourself because you aren't yet: you're layered with masks shaped by parents, teachers, and society, endlessly switching roles to meet expectations. This honest discomfort is a blessing, the first step toward revolution. Become aware, drop borrowed identities, stop fulfilling others' demands, and seek your 'original face', the authentic being prior to conditioning.
Because you've been wearing many pretend faces to please others, you don't feel like you, so start noticing and removing them to find the real you.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Why don't I feel that I am myself?
Now the time has come to get out of others' expectations. Don't go on fulfilling others' expectations; that is a very subtle slavery. The mother wants you to do this, the father wants you to do that, the society wants this... and everybody wants, everybody is making demands on you. And nobody leaves you alone and nobody wants you to do the thing that you would like to do. Now the time has come: do your own thing -- get out of all this bondage. This is what sannyas is all about: a declaration of freedom, a declaration that "I am going to be myself whatsoever the cost and whatsoever the consequences." And you will not be a loser, that I can promise you; you will not be a loser, you will be infinitely enriched. You are not here to fulfill others' expectations, you are here to live your authentic…
You told me to be myself. I don't understand. How can I be myself if I don't know myself?
Whether you know or not, you cannot be other than yourself. To be yourself, knowledge is not needed. A rosebush is a rosebush. Not that the rosebush knows that it is a rosebush. A rock is a rock. Not that the rock knows that it is a rock. Knowledge is not needed. In fact it is because of knowledge that you are missing to be yourself. You ask "You told me to be myself. I don't understand. How can I be myself if I don t know myself?' Knowledge is creating the problem. Look at the rosebush. She is not confused. Every day it goes on being a rosebush. Not even for a single day does it become confused. It does not start some morning growing marigolds; it goes on being a rosebush. It is not confused at all. Knowledge is not needed for being. In fact you are missing…
Beloved Osho, lately I find that I am desperately trying to find or do or learn something in order to give myself an identity, knowing perfectly well that this is a trap of the mind. Why is it so painful and shocking to not have any identity, to be nobody?
The psychology of the crowd is the problem. Your whole upbringing teaches you to be identified as a certain personality. Nobody is worried about who you are; everybody is putting different labels on you. And that is a very easy job, because the search for your own self can be done only by you; nobody else can do it on your behalf. The child comes into the world utterly innocent, a blank sheet of paper. He does not know even his own signature. We have to teach him his name, which is a fiction; and with this fiction every individual starts as a novel. One fiction leads to another. The whole life becomes fictitious, and we have to cling to it because that's all we have got. Otherwise, there is utter emptiness, nothingness, abysmal. We will be lost. A story will help you.... A man had lost his way in…
Osho, what is more important in your religion -- to be thyself or to know thyself?
Gurdjieff calls them "selves; it is the same. You can call personalities selves or egos, and you can start looking for them -- it is a tremendously charming game to look at them. In the evening, you decide that tomorrow morning you are going to get up at five. This you have been deciding for many years, and you know it -- that every evening you decide.... But this night is different! -- that too, you know. Every night you have been saying, "This night is different; tomorrow I am going to get up. There is a limit to everything!" But all these things you have been saying every night. You are not saying a single new thing, but you are not aware of it. And at five o'clock when the alarm goes, you just press the button; and you are angry at the clock. You may throw the clock,…
Beloved Osho, I am always afraid of being alone, because when I am alone I start to wonder who I am. It feels that if I inquire deeper, I will find out that I am not the person who I have believed I was for the past twenty-six years, but a being, present at the moment of birth and maybe also the moment before. For some reason, this scares me completely. It feels like a kind of insanity, and makes me lose myself in outside things in order to feel safer. Osho, who am I, and why the fear?
Keep engaged, do anything stupid. People are running towards the beaches, bumper to bumper, miles-long traffic. And if you ask them where they are going, they are getting away from the crowd -- and the whole crowd is going with them. They are going to find a solitary, silent space -- all of them. In fact, if they had remained home it would have been more solitary and silent -- because all the idiots have gone in search of a solitary place. And they are rushing like mad, because two days will be finished soon, they have to reach -- don't ask where! And on the beaches, you see... they are so crowded, not even marketplaces are so crowded. And strangely enough, people are feeling very much at ease, taking a sunbath. Ten thousand people on a small beach taking a sunbath, relaxing. The same person on the same beach…