I am undefined by others’ perceptions or ideas of me.

Everyone you know is carrying a slightly wrong version of you. Colleagues have the competent one. An old schoolfriend still has the fifteen-year-old. Your family holds a person you stopped being some years ago.

None of them are lying. They are each working from the fragment they happened to be present for. You are the only one with the whole file — the things you have changed your mind about, the private revisions nobody was told about.

So when someone's idea of you feels tight around the shoulders, it is usually just out of date. They are describing a room you already moved out of.