Nobody can answer the question who are you? It’s the wrong question — too large, asked too directly — and every honest attempt comes out sounding like either a résumé or a horoscope.
The old world knew this, which is why epithets were always given. Homer’s heroes never introduce themselves with adjectives; the poet assigns them, and the assignment sticks because the whole audience can check it against the story. The same law governs nicknames today — the ones that hold are issued by other people, because someone else saw the thing in you and said it out loud. The self-appointed nickname, famously, never takes.
So the masterclass never asks who you are. It asks four questions a person can actually answer — where you come from, what you believe, what you love, where you’re going — and your identity surfaces on its own, the way a shape appears when there are finally enough points to connect. The epithets on your cover are assembled out of sentences you actually said. Nothing is added that wasn’t already yours.
That’s the reason the name lands where affirmations don’t. An affirmation is a hope with the volume turned up, and some part of you always knows you wrote it yourself. An epithet mined from your own account is evidence. You can argue with flattery. It’s much harder to argue with a well-organized version of what you said an hour ago.
Almost everyone carries a title they would never dare claim. The process exists to launder the audacity: the name arrives from outside, with a witness attached, and wearing it stops being a boast and becomes something closer to accepting delivery. You don’t invent your epithet. You ratify it.
What do people actually come to you for — and what would it be called, set on a cover?
Whatever just crossed your mind and got dismissed as too much — that’s usually the one. It goes under your name, on panel one.