Severing ties with your former self, again and again, is the only path to perpetual growth.
The word “growth” itself implies becoming fundamentally different. If your habits and your thinking are the same as they were six months ago, you can’t honestly say you’ve grown.
Learning new things, building new habits, and forging a new identity — these, to me, are the three pillars of growth.
The first two are straightforward. But what does it mean to forge a new identity? Who decides when you have one? Simple: you are whoever you believe yourself to be.
The task is to convince yourself that you’re not the person you were six months ago — not even the person you were a month ago. Once you actually act, once you make real changes, the convincing gets easy. But if you keep living out the same patterns day after day, no amount of self-talk will make you believe it.
Looking back over the past six years, I break them into three-month blocks, and I can clearly feel that I was someone different in each one — and every reinvention was, in every respect, better than all the identities that came before it. Half of that came from genuinely wanting to be better; the other half came from convincing myself, almost to the point of brainwashing, that I had become someone new.
If you’re in pain, you’re living in the past. If you’re anxious, you’re living in the future.
The only way out of pain is to change how you live, build yourself a new identity, and draw a clean line between yourself and who you used to be. Understand that the bad things that happened belong to the old you, not to the person you are now. All that belongs to the present you is the experience and wisdom pulled from those dark moments. I carry that wisdom forward into each new identity, iterating on myself — but the old self is not me!
It helps to look at your past self from the outside. Treat that person as someone else entirely, and walking away becomes much easier.
I’ve watched too many people around me sink into their memories and never climb out, condemned to endless suffering and self-torment. Those memories boil down to two kinds: setbacks and misfortunes, in life or in work. Heartbreak, betrayal, failure — the list goes on.
Start by recognizing that no amount of suffering will change what is. Will it? Does crying, does falling apart, change a single fact? All it does is drag you toward a darker pit, until you can’t get back up.
First, accept that what happened can’t be undone. Then deal with the emotions — understand that having a reaction is normal. Next, actively look for a way out and break the endless loop of rumination: try something you’ve never done, or something you know is good for you — reading, exercise, cooking. And once your patterns of behavior have fundamentally changed, tell yourself, “You! You have a new identity!”
I have a new identity — different from a year ago, different from six months ago, different even from a month ago. And of course, one day it too will be eclipsed by a newer identity, brought forth by a better me.
A life holds countless metamorphoses, and here is how I define one: subjectively accepting that you are no longer who you were. Because no third party gets to judge what your life is worth.
“Let me look at myself from a month ago. Wow — how clueless was I? I didn’t even know this stuff, and I was still doing all those things. Hahaha, I don’t even recognize that person. Thank goodness I changed. Thank goodness I changed in time, before those habits could shape any more of my life. Thank goodness I changed.”
Zhengyang Yao
Santa Clara
February 16, 2026
