What can I, personally, do to "draw power and self-worth directly from my identity"?
This question deserves more in the way of a response than I’m going to provide here. Y’know, something on the order of “years of dedicated thought put into years’ worth of serious writing.”
But, in (very) brief:
1. Perform meditative/cognitive exercises. Think seriously about the kind of person you want to be, as seen from the outside – not just in an everyday instrumental/practical kind of way, not just in terms of “what you want to get done [that you haven’t already done],” but in a holistic and, uh, character-driven way. What kind of traits and quirks do you want to display? What kind of impression do you want the Cosmic Akashic Audience to come away with, after seeing you in action? To the extent you don’t live up to the image that this process generates, try to do so. More to the point, to the extent that you do (which is likely to be very considerable), take the time to consciously recognize and consider that fact. You are (in some measure) the person that you want to be. Isn’t that great? Doesn’t it seem like you should be reveling in that fact, and indeed using it for something structural, rather than letting it gather dust in the back shelves of your mindscape?
(To be absolutely clear: stripped of its self-help-y phrasing, this is to some extent calling for a values / utility-function shift in most people. I am recommending that you focus on moving away from a methodology that checks well-being in terms of having things and having done things and experiencing things towards one that checks well-being in terms of being things. Which, in my experience, is a very natural way for people to deal with envy and with external things-they-find-cool but not at all a natural way for them to deal with themselves on a day-to-day basis.)
2. Acquire personal symbols, use them liberally, and encourage those who care about you to employ them as appropriate. It’s very easy to feel like all the things that make you cool are just part-of-the-fabric-of-the-world, that you partake in the same actions and thoughts as a million other people and that your version of them isn’t particularly special or meaningful. Heraldry, catchphrases, etc. allow you to “tag” an instance of a thing as being particularly associated with you, so that at such time as it generates worthwhile results you funnel the ensuing reward towards your own identity. In lame normie language, this is “building your brand” on a micro-level.
As an additional bonus, this process creates a positive resonance between yourself (from which you want to draw welfare) and various symbols that you presumably find cool (from which you are already drawing welfare).
3. Identify and attack the anti-identitarian memes that are floating around your own mind, insofar as they’re worth attacking. None of this psychological program I’m pushing here is “natural,” but we do make it a lot harder than it has to be by actively denigrating the psychological state of (literal) self-satisfaction. And you can always just, y’know, try to stop doing that. Probably you don’t want to mess around with your core ideals here, but…probably you won’t have to in order to get something good out of this.
Idealizing accomplishment is fine, but remember that a lot of concrete accomplishment devolves to some combination of luck and willingness-to-sell-out, and it may be better to reframe it as idealizing “being the kind of person who actually does the kinds of things that generate accomplishment.” Being a hedonic consequentialist is fine (I guess), but the world is terrible at reliably providing the raw stuff of happiness and our brains are even worse at processing it, so it might be worthwhile to put some of your eggs in the basket of “being the kind of person who seeks to make a happier world.” Etc.
More later, perhaps, as I think on this.