The Upanishadic method has a name: Neti Neti. Not this. Not this.
It proceeds by negation — not to arrive at nothing but to arrive at what cannot be negated. You are not your body. You are not your thoughts. You are not your emotions. You are not your history.
And you are not your title.
The collapse happens gradually and with excellent justification. The role required everything — time, attention, sacrifice. The role produced results that confirmed the investment. The role became the answer to every question about who you are.
And then the role ends. And the person who identified completely with it discovers something they were not prepared for: without the role, they do not know who they are. The external structure that was organising the inner life is gone.
The Chandogya Upanishad's Uddalaka asks his son Shvetaketu — who has returned from twelve years of Vedic education, filled with the confidence of acquired knowledge — a series of questions designed to produce exactly this confrontation. Who are you beyond what you know? Who are you beneath the competence and the credential? The teaching that follows — Tat Tvam Asi, That Thou Art — is the answer. But the answer is not available until the question has been genuinely felt.
The practical exercise: sit for twenty minutes and do not reference anything you do, have done, or are recognised for. Describe yourself without any role, credential, achievement, or relationship.
What remains is the actual starting point of a life that is genuinely yours. The title will disappear. Titles always do. The question is whether you have been building anything below it that can stand on its own.