Saturday I beat a guy 6-0, 6-0 in a league singles match. The other team watched. After the match, one of them came over and said my play didn’t match my rating.
Then he said: El Gato.
The cat.
He looked at his teammates. Smiled. Said: some gatos are house cats. Then he looked back at me and said I was a tiger.
He didn’t know that three months earlier, after a completely different tennis match, in a completely different context — different people, different night, different league — someone else had already called me the same thing.
He didn’t know any of that. He just watched me play and said what he saw.
That’s when you know something is real. Not when you decide it about yourself. When it shows up independently, in people who have no reason to agree with each other.
You don’t choose your nickname. You earn it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the gap between who you say you are and who you actually are. Most of us spend a lot of time on the first one. Describing ourselves, presenting ourselves, curating the story we want others to believe.
The second one — who you actually are — that’s built in the places nobody’s watching.
It’s built in the gym sessions you do alone. The rituals you keep even when they feel pointless. The mornings you get up when nothing external requires it. The matches you go into prepared and the ones you fight through unprepared. The moments when you’re tired and scared and still make the right decision.
That’s where the actual identity gets built.
And then, eventually, a stranger watches you for an hour and names it back to you in his language. And the word he chooses is the same one someone else already chose, independently, months before.
That’s not confirmation bias. That’s something becoming true.
I went through cancer. I went through a period after that where everything came apart — the relationship, the job, the finances, the sense of who I was. I spent months rebuilding from what felt like nothing.
I couldn’t see it while I was doing it. You never can.
But this week my sister asked what happened with the woman I’d been with for years — the one who left during the hardest stretch. And answering the question, I realized how far I was from that place. Not just in time. In who I am.
The version of me from that season — the one carrying everything, barely functional, alone in a way that doesn’t have a word for it — he couldn’t have walked onto that tennis court and played the way I played Saturday. He couldn’t have been El Gato. He was still figuring out how to be anything.
But he kept moving. Every morning. Even when there was no reason to.
And now strangers are naming what that produced.
If you’re in the middle of your rebuilding right now — I want you to hear this:
The nickname you want isn’t something you decide. It’s something you earn. Quietly. Repeatedly. In the moments nobody sees.
Keep building it.
Just. Keep. Moving.