The identity treadmill

Three days after I graduated high school, I found out I wasn’t who I thought I was.

For eighteen years I’d had one answer to “who are you.” I was a lacrosse player. Not a kid who played lacrosse. A lacrosse player, the way you’d state a fact about the weather. I had the scholarship to prove it, a spot waiting at Hofstra, the whole identity stamped and sealed since I was small.

Then, three days after graduation, my heart went into something called ventricular tachycardia. I woke up with a defibrillator implanted in my chest and a doctor explaining, gently, that my playing days were over. The scholarship was rescinded. In the span of a week I went from a Division 1 athlete to a kid headed to community college, and I had no idea who that kid was.

That was the first time I got thrown off the treadmill. It turned out to be the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. It just took me twenty years to understand why.

The thing you do is not the thing you are

Here is the move almost all of us make, usually without noticing.

We find a thing we’re good at, or a thing that earns us approval, and we become it. Not “I do this.” “I am this.” I am an athlete. I am a founder. I am the smart one, the funny one, the one who has it together. The role stops being something you do and turns into the floor you stand on.

And it feels great, because for a while the floor holds. You get the title, the win, the nod from the room, and a quiet voice says: good, now I know who I am.

But you don’t own that floor. You’re renting it.

The treadmill

(running to stand still)

Why the treadmill never stops

The reason this becomes a treadmill, and not just a one-time mistake, is that the rented identity works just well enough.

Every achievement delivers a real hit. You reach the milestone and for a moment you feel like someone solid. But it’s a loan, not income. The feeling fades, or the role itself ends. You get cut. You sell the company. You age out. You fail. And the floor goes with it. Suddenly you’re standing on nothing, and the only thing that has ever made you feel like someone is another achievement. So you chase the next one. And the next.

Achieve, feel like someone, watch it fade, panic, achieve again. You are sprinting, and the scenery never changes.

Achievement is a rented identity, and the rent always comes due.

The cruel part

Here’s what makes it so hard to see from the inside: the treadmill speeds up the more you win.

The more you’ve achieved, the more of your identity is riding on the next thing, which means the most accomplished people in the room are often the most quietly terrified. They have the most to lose, because they’ve staked the most of themselves on a role that, like every role, is temporary. The founder who is his company cannot survive selling it. The athlete who is the sport cannot survive the injury. The parent who is only a parent cannot survive the kids growing up.

Which is why getting thrown off early, the way I was at eighteen, is a brutal kind of gift. Most people don’t discover they aren’t their role until it’s taken in their fifties, or their sixties, or never. I found out at eighteen, flat on my back, with the only identity I’d ever had dissolving in real time. I got to learn the lesson while I still had a whole life to use it: I lost the role, and I was still here.

The grammar that saves you

I’m not going to tell you to stop achieving. I didn’t. I went to community college, clawed my way into Penn, went into fashion, built companies, took one from $33M to $280M. Achievement is great. Do a lot of it.

The fix isn’t to want less. It’s a change of grammar.

Two sentences, two fates

“I am a founder.”

fragile. ends when the role ends.

“I build things.”

durable. survives every role.

There is a quiet, enormous difference between “I am a lacrosse player” and “I play lacrosse.” One is a claim about your existence that shatters the moment the activity stops. The other is just a thing you happen to be doing right now. Same with “I am a founder” versus “I’m building something.” The verb is durable. The noun is a trap.

So watch your sentences. Every time you catch yourself saying “I am a ___,” notice that you’ve just rented another identity, and ask what would be left of you if that role vanished tomorrow. Whatever survives the question is the actual you. Build that.

For me, the thing that survived was never the sport, and later it was never the fashion, or the title on a business card. It was something underneath all of them: a way of seeing, a need to make things, a particular taste that walked with me from a lacrosse field to a photo shoot to a boardroom. The roles kept changing. That didn’t. It turns out that was who I was the whole time. The lacrosse was just the first costume.

Back in the hospital

So let me go back to that eighteen-year-old, because I understand him better now.

He thought his life had ended, because the only self he had was being taken from him. What was actually happening was the opposite. He was being handed, early and against his will, the one lesson that makes a person hard to break: you are not the thing you do. You are not your verb. The role can be rescinded in a week, and you will still be here. You will find another thing to do, and that one can go too, and you will still be here.

The treadmill only has power over you for as long as you believe you are the thing you’re running toward. The moment you realize you’re not, you can step off. And then you can run because you actually like running.

I lost my whole identity three days after high school. I’ve spent every year since grateful that I lost it so young.