If one bad game can wreck your whole week, you’ve packed your whole identity into one bag.

Putting everything into one thing makes you good at it and fragile in it at the same time. When the sport or the grade or the part carries all of your worth, an ordinary bad night turns into a referendum on you, and the stakes get too high to play loose. Fragility and pressure feed each other from there.

Add a second bag this season. Something you are decent at that nobody scores: cooking, a friendship you keep up, drawing, a job you do well. It is what lets the main thing have a bad night without taking the whole week with it.