In 2010, I experienced my 1st identity collapse.

I had just graduated from Georgetown University where I played Wide Receiver and Running Back on the Football team. A few weeks after graduation… reality hit me like a linebacker.

I walked in the door of my parent’s home and in a potent moment, my entire life converged into a scary realization: I wasn’t who I thought I was anymore.

I wasn’t a football player anymore.

I wasn’t a student-athlete anymore.

I dropped to the floor.

Structurally, I felt the architecture of my psyche dissolve, similar to how sugar cubes dissolve in water. Everything I thought I was, fell into the deep abyss of nothingness and physically, I fell with it.

I felt immense sadness and cried because of how much football meant to me.

I feared falling into the abyss… the unknown… the mystery.

Football was my life.

It was my core identity until 1 day it wasn’t.

I reminisce thinking about my early days of soccer, basketball, and then football. I tried baseball but I sucked at it. I couldn’t hit a beach ball with a tennis racket. It’s hilarious thinking about that now, but as a young boy, it was frustrating.

Football was my first love.

Once the sadness dissolved after graduation, then came the anger.

I was pissed no one told me this type of psychological collapse was going to happen at the end of a sports career. And at the time, I certainly did not hold a state of consciousness to gno that this was going to turn into one of the biggest blessings of my life:

This moment gave birth to a question I never asked myself up until then…

“Who am I then?”

This simple question was the spark that set me on a lifelong journey in search of the Truth with a capital T.

“Who am I?” became the thread that I am still asking myself to this day, 13 years later. It’s a focusing question laced with curiosity that orients me towards seeking out what works and what doesn’t. What is true and what isn’t.

Over the years, similar collapses would happen. They never got easier, they were just different… and each contained a beautiful gift that I usually wouldn’t realize until a few years down the road.

Flowing with the waves of change became easier once I stopped gripping the wheel so hard and learned to trust the natural process of growth unfolding within me.

Just like an acorn trusts it will ultimately grow into an oak tree… as Nature designed it to.

After these past few years, I am pondering some new questions:

“When everything falls apart, what eternal structures remain?”

“No matter what is created or what is destroyed… what is preserved because it is eternal?”

“What’s real?”

Your true nature is what’s real… the unchanging, yet always evolving aspect of you.

The you that doesn’t need to be anything or anyone other than who you are in your most natural and beautiful uniqueness, as you were designed to be from the jump.

And that’s more than enough.