Identity and Roles

A response to “Learning to Trust Yourself Again”

In Learning to Trust Yourself Again, Sunjay Chopra describes uncertainty like being in a boat in the middle of a lake at night: unsure which direction leads to shore. The instinct is panic. The instinct is to find direction immediately.

But what if the real lesson isn’t just trusting yourself in the middle?

What if the deeper lesson is letting go of the idea that you need to become something specific at all?

The Trap of Becoming

From the moment we start thinking about our future, we are asked the same question:

What do you want to become?

An engineer.
A founder.
A doctor.
A writer.

The framing itself is the trap.

Because it assumes life is a straight line toward a fixed identity.

But life doesn’t work that way.

You don’t become one thing and stay there.

You learn, adapt, and evolve.

Identity Is a Moving Target

For most of my life, people would look at the end result and assume the title was the goal.

“Software engineer.”

But that wasn’t the plan.

I was just a kid from a rough environment trying to figure out how the world worked.

Coding was just one of the tools that helped me move forward.

And if that tool stopped working tomorrow, I would learn another one.

Because the real skill isn’t engineering.

The real skill is adaptation.

The Illusion of the Shore

In the Substack article, the metaphor is about rowing toward the shoreline.

But here’s something life eventually teaches you:

Sometimes the shore you thought you were rowing toward was never the destination.

Sometimes the entire point was learning how to row.

Titles change.

Industries change.

Tools change.

But the ability to learn, adapt, and build something new stays with you.

The Real Form of Self-Trust

Self-trust isn’t knowing the destination.

Self-trust is knowing you can survive the journey.

That if the path collapses tomorrow, you’ll build another one.

That if the map disappears, you’ll learn how to navigate anyway.

This is the difference between someone who chases titles and someone who plays the long game.

One tries to become something.

The other becomes someone who can handle anything.

Don’t Become Someone Else

So if you’re in the middle right now. Unsure where you’re going. That might not be failure.

It might mean the old definitions of success stopped fitting.

And that’s okay.

You don’t need to become an engineer.

You don’t need to become a founder.

You don’t need to become anyone else.

Just keep learning.

Keep adapting.

Keep rowing.

Because the people who win the long game aren’t the ones who found the shore fastest.

They’re the ones who learned how to navigate the water.