Education's ancient and profoundly important pursuit to "know thyself", is often realised through engaging with the question "who am I?" In order to the identify "who" in this search, it is argued in this paper that personal identity should be understood to be embedded in the purposes one has for one's life through "how" one relates, and is therefore spiritual. This spiritual quality of personal identity is therefore existential in character--not essential. However, often when children respond to this question "who am I?", they rely upon socially constructed categories and labels such as religious, feminine, cool, punk and the like. The application of such labelling assumes that meaningfulness lies in their essence; that is, they identify what "is". This can become most problematic when individuals accept and apply such essentialist labelling to themselves, because such a process can only answer "'what' am I?" and not the educationally more important question of "'who' am I?" This paper therefore challenges the inadequacy of such an approach and offers a conceptualisation of personal identity which is spiritually embedded in a purpose for one's life.