When we conflate who we are with what we do, it’s perhaps no wonder we crowd numerous shoulds onto our to-do lists—it helps us feel tethered to something. But if to tether is to restrict, do we really want to restrict ourselves and narrow who we are? When we tie who we are to what we do, we can get stuck in an “if only” spiral—we might say we are a runner, for example, but then shame ourselves when we don’t manage to run every day. We make the mistake of labeling ourselves as nouns, when we are really verbs—we are not a runner, but rather a person who runs; we’re not a writer, but a person who
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