Your worst moments don’t define you. They’re the moments you had to get through.

A hard stretch can start to feel like an identity, as though the worst thing that has happened is now the main fact about you. It is not. Those hours were conditions you had to get through, and getting through them is a different sort of event from choosing them. What a person is made of shows far more in the thousands of ordinary decisions that come afterwards.

If something heavy is in your recent past, go gently and let it stay a chapter rather than a title. Tell one person you trust what it was actually like.