Great piece with a bit of "The dark night of the soul" thrown in.
The scriptures, the Upanishads and the Avadhuta Gita, are very clear in their answer to your question.
Whatever you think you are, you are not.
In our ashram I learned a kind of inquisitive ritual, an analytical process, where two people would come together, one sits in a meditative state of inquiry and then says whatever attributes come to the mind: I am a man, I am German, I am a bricklayer etc, and the other person just calmly answers: Neti, neti - not this. not this/neither this nor that to each attribute mentioned.
Then the person who mentioned an attribute meditates a bit on that attribute and the neti neti, and then mentions the next attribute and is told neti neti again and so on.
By this method of negation or deduction you remove layer after layer of attributes covering like veils that what you truly are, the Atman, the Immortal Self.
Because all you think what you are, or even more ridiculous, what other people think you are, is just that, ephemeral thoughts.
It can be of course also a bit frightening, to destroy those layers of identity, because we think, however wrong a definition, better than no defintion at all, but if you embrace that truth of neti neti, it can be also quite liberating.