#you prided yourself on being the comic relief but iturns out you weren't and you're totally wrong and now that part of your identity is gon

[thousandyearphantombunker]

Or another direction- you are indeed the person they loved but your realizing everyone's perception of you is wildly different from how perceive yourself or their perception of you had changed drastically- and with everyone telling you that you came back wrong- you start to believe it. either way it fucks up your sense of identity and now your scrambling to either actually fit the identity for yourself you originally thought you had or are aggressively trying to fit into how your loved ones perceive you or want you to be like.

You discover your best friend is in love with you and force yourself to reciprocate or you find out that your close co worker always thought you were annoying and bad at your job. You force yourself to reciprocate your friends feelings- did you have romantic moments? Did he love you this whole time?- is your memory fuzzy/wrong? It's as clear as day in your head but everyone is insisting things went down differently- that your the one that's different.

You used to light up the room with your jokes and clownery! you were always so unserious and silly- according to your mother but you remember being angry and serious which she doesn't like very much it seems. You try to be the son you once were according to your mother but she insists it's all wrong or maybe out of anger you aggressively try and show her you've always been serious - that isn't you and never will be.

You question if you ever knew your co worker and try to be less annoying - your identity was the smart mouthed witty guy but maybe that was wrong and your just dumb? Everything about you is exactly the same as before you died in terms of your personality and memories but your perception of yourself is different from how others saw you.

your mom put you on a pedestal of eternal babyhood/innocence after you died- you don't see her little baby boy in the mirror you see a 35 year old with a shitty office job and a car

your friend had harbored these feelings for years and read your actions as romantic because of those feelings

your coworker always hated you but was just being nice/professional about it and you read the room wrong because your way worse at social skills than you thought

Etc

This could be some great psychological horror honestly

I love the "came back wrong" trope but from the opposite side.

Imagine you are dead. And then you are RIPPED from the embrace of decay into the world of the living again. Your memories are hazy and you don't recognize any of these people, but they act like they're close to you? Like they love you? So you try to get your memories back, to act like you belong here, but everybody tries to forget you died. And you can't. It is omnipresent. And just trying to grapple with that fact pushes the people who "love" you away, and they're incapable of understanding, and they're so confused, what's wrong N̶̄̀O̶͛͗T̷̉́ ̷͋͝Y̴̎̌Ȍ̴̈U̸̓R NÄM̴̃͑E̵̾̇? And you just need them to understand, you aren't that person! You aren't! You don't know who that person is! You don't know why any of this is happening, but they're unwilling to bend, they keep insisting you are that person, your memories will come back, everything will be normal again, and you want to scream and cry and claw yourself open to show them you're different. Your existence as a being wholly separate from whoever you "used to be" is a sin unto itself. All you can do is scrabble for life and to them, you're killing whoever they loved to do it.

just. lots of fun in that concept, you know?