Existential Reflections:

According to Stuart Greenstreet, writing in Philosophy Now, 2016:

"No objective account of my properties could ever describe my subjective experience of what it's like to be me, the person who has them. So someone observing me can make out my skin colour, class, or ethnicity; but the moment he attempts to identify me in terms of these properties, he encounters a paradox, since the kind of being I am is defined, among other things, by the attitude I adopt towards my own facticity - by how I choose to interpret it - and that is not fixed by the facts... To become the person you choose to be despite the burden of your facticity is the only authentic way to live your life, whereas to live it as though you were at the mercy of your facticity - to pretend that it has robbed you of your freedom - is inauthenticity. It would be to lose both one's autonomy and one's integrity, and in this way give in to determinism."

According to Sartre:

"A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a solider-thing which a direct regard which does not see at all, which is no longer meant to see, since it is the rule and not the interest of the moment which determines the point he must fix his eyes on (the sight "fixed at ten pages"). There are indeed many precautions to imprison man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition."

Let's apply these ideas to you:

While it's true that existentialism reminds us to have faith in our freedom to our own lives, it's also true that we do so against the expectations that other people have of us. In short, other people isolate some contingent fact about us (like the fact we might work as a grocer, a grocer-thing), then "imprison" us in that fact, thus reducing us to only one possibility of being. If we freely "act" against their expectations, they may be "offended" or disappointed or angry or even a little defensive. To test this general theory: fill in the blank: "Other people think of me as a ______." You may have to create a list because different people may isolate some facts about you while other people isolate other facts. For example, you might say, "Other people think of me as an athlete."

Once you have a list of how other people view you, ask whether they have ever done or said things that might be attempts to "imprison" you in that perspective. What sorts of things were done or said? What happened when you might have surprised them by acting or living in ways not "typically" associate with that perspective? (Like a grocer not acting entirely like a grocer.) How did people react to these unexpected behaviors? How did this make you feel?