There’s a thing that happens when you get a diagnosis. Or when a relationship ends. Or when the job disappears, or the body breaks, or the version of your life you’d been building just… stops being available.
Everyone around you starts treating you like your circumstances.
The doctors talk to The Patient. The friends talk to The Person Who’s Going Through It. Even you — if you’re not careful — start talking to yourself that way.
I’m someone with cancer. I’m someone going through a divorce. I’m someone who lost everything.
I spent a long time fighting that framing. This week I finally found the language for why it matters so much.
I am not my circumstances. I am only my identity. I am only forward moving. I am only who I am.
Not who cancer made me. Not who the hard years shaped me into. Not the sum of what happened to me.
Just: who I am. Who I’m becoming. Full stop.
This week I’m captaining my USTA league tennis team to sectionals. I’m not telling you that to brag — I’m telling you because three years ago I was sitting in an infusion chair wondering if I’d ever feel like an athlete again. Wondering if the body that used to run down every ball would be the body I got to keep.
It is. Mostly. It’s different now — smarter, sometimes slower, more deliberate. But it showed up on the court. It kept showing up. And now I’m the one deciding who plays where, who gets the match that matters most.
That’s not a cancer story. That’s an identity story.
The cancer was a circumstance. The person who kept building through it — who kept logging the rituals, doing the work, showing up for the people he loves, treating every setback as data instead of defeat — that’s the identity. The circumstances changed. The identity didn’t.
Here’s what I’ve learned about circumstances: they will keep coming. There’s always another thing. Another scan. Another complication. Another person or situation that could derail you if you let it.
Circumstances don’t stop showing up. You just stop letting them vote.
Not by ignoring them. Not by pretending they don’t affect you. But by being clear, every single day, about who you are independent of what’s happening around you. By having an identity that doesn’t require good circumstances to exist.
That’s the work. That’s the whole thing.
And it’s not a one-time decision. It’s a daily one. Sometimes a moment-by-moment one. The ritual, the log, the question — what arc am I building? Who am I becoming today? — those aren’t self-help habits. They’re the mechanism for keeping your identity in the driver’s seat when circumstances are trying to take the wheel.
If you’re in hard circumstances right now — and I know some of you reading this are — I want you to hear this clearly:
Your circumstances are real. What you’re going through is real. I’m not asking you to minimize it or perform positivity about it.
I’m asking you to refuse to let it be the whole story about who you are.
You are not your diagnosis. You are not your worst season. You are not the thing that’s happening to you.
Circumstances don’t get a vote on your identity. Only you do.
Just. Keep. Moving.