How I lose parts of myself without losing my whole self
Identity grief is what happens when you can still remember who you were, but your body won’t let you live that way anymore.
That’s the simplest version.
But the deeper version is that it doesn’t just threaten activities.
It threatens the foundation underneath them.
The way you think of yourself.
The way you move in a room.
The way you belong.
The way you feel useful.
The way you carry swagger, confidence, masculinity, ease, and presence.
That’s what makes identity grief so brutal.
It doesn’t only take what you do.
It starts taking aim at who you think you are.
For me, it didn’t arrive all at once.
It crept in.
Brain fog showed up early, but that was easy to explain away. I was tired. I was partying. Life was busy. I was drinking too much in those years, and that made it easier to ignore what was really happening.
But eventually the symptoms stopped feeling like random weirdness and started feeling like something I couldn’t explain away.
The first big identity hit was physical.
My right leg started limping. Early drop foot showed up. My right hand lost dexterity.
And slowly, I started realizing this wasn’t just a symptom problem anymore.
This was becoming a self problem.
The loudest identity hit came through dance.
I hadn’t even stopped working yet. I was still trying to live like myself, still going out, still trying to party, still trying to move through the world with the same confidence I’d always had.
I was in a house club one night, dancing hard, feeling normal enough, feeling like me.
Then I bent forward in one move, and the next thing I knew, I was going down.
At least that’s how it felt to me.
Slow.
Apparently it wasn’t slow at all.
Because the next clear thing I remember is looking up and seeing my friends standing over me with that look on their faces:
concern, shock, fear.
The whole room had shifted.
I was still inside my own body, almost confused about why everyone was so alarmed.
I was the one on the floor and still thinking:
What’s wrong?
Why are you all looking at me like that?
That’s identity grief right there.
Not just that the body failed.
That it failed publicly.
That other people saw the change before I was ready to really face it myself.
That moment didn’t stop me right away.
I still tried to party.
Still tried to push through.
Still tried to be who I had been.
But it lodged in me.
A dividing line.
A warning shot.
A first undeniable crack in the picture I still had of myself.
Because dancing was never just dancing.
It was swagger.
It was belonging.
It was social ease.
It was freedom inside my body.
It was masculinity.
It was confidence.
It was culture.
And yeah, before I met my wife, it helped me pick up girls too.
It was part of my game. Part of my identity. Part of the way I could say, without saying it:
I’m here, I feel good, and I know who I am.
I didn’t grow up deeply connected to my Trinidadian side. I found more of that in my twenties.
But dance was already part of me by then — hip-hop, house music, movement, confidence.
So when I stepped more fully into Trinidadian culture, soca and calypso felt natural. They felt like a real extension of something already alive in me.
So when that started slipping, it wasn’t just that I lost an activity.
I lost a language.
That’s what people miss about identity grief.
It’s not only:
I can’t do this thing anymore.
It’s:
this thing was carrying a whole part of me inside it.
That’s why it cut so hard later too, when family and friends noticed it.
You could read it on people’s faces.
Not cruelty.
Not mockery.
Just the shock of recognition:
Miguel is not moving like Miguel anymore.
That hurts.
And once identity grief hits, life starts shrinking.
That’s the real danger.
You start mourning what you used to be, but you don’t yet know how to bridge that into a new you.
So you withdraw.
You stop showing up.
You stop reaching.
You stop risking joy.
You stop stepping toward things that might make you feel alive because you’re too busy protecting yourself from feeling the loss again.
That’s the cocoon.
And the cocoon feels safe for a while.
Because if you don’t show up, nobody sees the difference.
Nobody sees you limp.
Nobody sees the cane.
Nobody sees the drag.
Nobody sees the version of you that doesn’t match the old picture in your head.
But the cocoon has a cost:
it makes grief feel like identity.
That’s why the first bad coping moves for me were overpushing, numbing, and hiding.
Trying to be normal.
Trying to perform normal.
Trying to outrun the evidence.
Trying to drink enough that I didn’t have to feel what was changing.
That’s not wisdom.
That’s grief in costume.
And it’s dangerous.
Because once I started measuring myself only by what I could still physically do, I got trapped in a brutal scorecard.
How much can I still do today?
Can I still provide?
Can I still carry weight?
Can I still be useful?
Can I still keep people from seeing me as weak?
That’s the usefulness trap.
And it gets ugly fast.
Because if your whole identity is built on output, then illness starts feeling like erasure.
That’s why this chapter had to be in the book.
Because this is where the deeper question lives:
if I lose the form I knew, do I lose myself too?
For a while, I didn’t know the answer.
What kept identity loss from becoming identity death was my girls.
That was the handrail.
Not creativity at first.
Not some enlightened acceptance.
My girls.
I know what it feels like to be failed by parents.
Not just by cruelty or violence, though that matters too.
The deeper wound is unreliability.
The person you are wired to depend on for safety, steadiness, and love is not there in the way you need.
That kind of failure gets into your bones.
I did not want to be that.
So what I was grieving at first was the loss of physicalness.
I didn’t know how to be a father if I couldn’t be the physical version I imagined.
I didn’t know how to bridge from old usefulness into new usefulness.
And that became the real rebuild.
Because slowly I learned something:
fatherhood was not about showing out.
It was about showing up.
That changed everything.
It wasn’t about throwing the ball the hardest.
Not about running down the street.
Not about looking strong.
It was about conversation.
A helping hand.
Being present.
Explaining things emotionally when they couldn’t yet understand them.
Being there.
Being reliable.
Being in the room.
That’s what mattered most.
That’s what usefulness became.
And one of the clearest signs that I wasn’t disappearing completely was when I started building life around them in practical ways.
Homework.
School.
Home rhythm.
Being useful in the house.
Walking Maliya to the bus stop in that new neighborhood.
Becoming the unofficial crossing guard with the whistle.
Helping kids cross.
Showing up.
It sounds small.
It wasn’t small.
That was the rebuild.
It became about showing up, not showing out.
That’s one of the biggest truths in the whole chapter.
Because it gave me a new definition of usefulness that was not based on old physical identity alone.
And once that happened, I could start grieving honestly without letting grief become my whole self.
That’s the philosophy here.
Grief is real.
It deserves room.
But it does not get to become my whole identity.
Losing forms of myself is not losing my whole self.
That’s the line I believe now.
And reinvention, as scary as it is, is not betrayal.
It’s necessary.
Not just because I’m sick.
Because reinvention is part of life anyway.
People change.
Bodies change.
Roles change.
Priorities change.
The hard part with MS is that the body is failing while the reinvention is happening, so the grief feels louder and crueler.
But grief is not the only thing humans can do.
People change and still love.
Still laugh.
Still build meaning.
Still connect.
Still become someone.
That’s what I want this chapter to say.
Not:
“I lost things and now I’m a brand-new shiny person.”
That’s nonsense.
More like:
I lost things.
I grieved them.
I hid for a while.
And then I learned that showing up still counts, usefulness can change shape, and dignity can survive change.
Later, creativity became another handrail.
That matters too.
Because being a dad gave me duty.
Creating gave me self.
It gave me agency.
Proof I still existed.
A voice.
A way to keep becoming someone instead of only narrating loss.
That’s what the memoir did for me.
That’s what this book is doing too.
It’s not a miracle.
It’s a return.
Not to the old self.
To a living self.
That’s the real turn in this chapter.
Not from grief to happiness.
From grief to relationship.
From collapse to showing up.
From old usefulness to new usefulness.
From identity loss to identity change.
That’s the road.
And if the reader only borrows one thing from this chapter, I want it to be this:
MS changed my life, but it does not get the final word on who I am.
That’s the truth I had to fight for.
Not perfectly.
Not all at once.
But enough to keep going.
Enough to keep showing up.
Enough to keep becoming someone.
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