Throughout my childhood, my dad called me ‘Tyger’ (instead of ‘Tyler’) because of my physicality, my competitive drive, and my fearlessness.
It’s funny. Because these days, when I look back on my childhood-self, what first comes to mind is how much I’ve changed. How my thoughts and behaviors are so different now from what they once were.
At a recent dinner, my dad told me he was shocked to learn I started my own podcast since, in my youth, I suffered from debilitating social anxiety.
Today, I think and act in ways I could have never imagined.
It’s tempting to say I’ve changed so much over the last twenty years that I’m unrecognizable from my childhood-self. And if you knew me as a kid, you’d probably agree.
But as I’ve thought more deeply about the parts of my identity that most define who I am, I realize the core of my being hasn’t changed much at all.
My appetite for physical challenge, for example, is still alive and well. (I’m now closing in on 1,000 days of gym.) The deep competitiveness I had as a kid hasn’t subsided either. If anything, my desire to prove myself has only grown.
Other dimensions of my personality too - my need for solitude, my love for reading, my industrious nature, etc. These have all been stable parts of my identity and I don’t expect they’ll ever change.
And on fearlessness… well, I recently decided to quit my job and move to Seoul with only a vague plan in place.
I know this decision will be confusing to many. Because was I not already on the path to “success”?
Last month, I wrote a piece on Hope, which explains some of my recent actions. And related to this, author Kent Nerburn has an excellent quote on debt that helps articulate my situation. He said, “Debt defines your future, and when your future is defined, hope begins to die.”
Thankfully, I’m not in a debt crisis. But, on several dimensions, I felt as though my future was being too tightly defined (even if that defined future seemed “good”).
I have suspected for some time that there are more possibilities for me to explore and that, through this process of exploration, new evolutions of my character to discover.
Of course, my controlling ego fights the uncertainty at hand. But I try and remind myself of Ernest Becker’s commentary in The Denial of Death (1973):
“To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself. One has to stick his neck out in the action without any guarantees about satisfaction or safety.
One never knows how it will come out or how silly he will look, but the neurotic type wants these guarantees. He doesn’t want to risk his self-image.”
Moving forward, I’ll be using the name ‘Tyger’ instead of Tyler. An acknowledgement that I’ve both (1) entered a new stage in life but (2) an acceptance that, in many ways, I am still the same person I’ve always been.
