Breaking Up With an Identity: What Letting Go of BMX Taught Me About Performance, Safety, and Freedom

I Was 31 When I Broke Up With My First Love

Six years ago, I walked away from my childhood dream. What I wasn’t aware of was the fact I was breaking up with the first thing I truly loved. 

At least, that’s what Jackie helped me realize. Funny enough, it’s a chapter title in my upcoming book that I credit to her, “Breaking Up With My First Love.”

She said this to me during the pandemic, just months after choosing to walk away from BMX and being left to process what my body felt with nowhere to retreat to other than my mind. It was during theses months she would gently say, “Josh, I think you’re depressed.” I would respond, “Nah, I just don’t feel like doing anything I enjoy and just want to sleep.”

First stage, denial…check!

What I came to realize is that I wasn’t processing the grief my body didn’t feel safe to allow. When I got close to letting it in, my nervous system would move into shutdown mode as a way to keep me safe by virtue of numbing me internally. Due to a lifetime of pushing through that shutdown, on the outside, I was very functional when it came to being numb on the inside. 

It wasn’t depression, end of sentence. It was grief.

Deep, painful grief depression was protecting me from accessing.

Not for a job.Not for a hobby.

Of an identity I had outgrown.

For most of my life, I didn’t just do Freestyle BMX.

I was a BMX athlete.

That distinction matters more than I understood at the time.

Walking away didn’t feel brave or empowering in the moment. It felt destabilizing. The fear wasn’t dramatic, but it was constant and sneaky. A quiet, looping question that lived in my body more than my mind:

“What do I do now?”

That question didn’t show up as curiosity. It showed up as anxiety. Hyper-vigilance. A restless need to distract myself from something I couldn’t yet name but labeled as a problem to solve.

I had spent a lifetime numbing my emotions through performance and adrenaline. BMX started as an escape in childhood and slowly became a survival pathway as an adult. Each hit of adrenaline reinforced a familiar internal chemistry that my nervous system mistook for safety.

Choosing to participate in life without that familiar behavior felt dangerous. Not logically, biologically. Identity isn’t who you are. It’s who you learned you needed to be to feel safe.

The anxiety wasn’t a flaw. It was my body trying to speak in the form of trapped survival energy. But I had learned early on to ignore that signal. Feeling had once created more pain, not less. So I adapted. I froze functionally. I intellectualized. I pushed forward.

Growth and progression became my way of managing fear. BMX gave that strategy a socially celebrated outlet.

Until it didn’t anymore and that was a decision my intuition guided me in making, despite it being the most difficult decision I ever chose to make.

What follows isn’t a story about leaving BMX. It’s about what happens when the identity you built for survival outlives its purpose.

Identity Isn’t Purpose, It’s Expression.

Letting go of BMX forced me to confront something I had never separated before.

Identity and purpose are not the same.

Purpose evolves.

Identity protects.

My purpose was never BMX. It was growth, impact, and contribution. It was to overcome the mental constraints I had been programmed and conditioned with. BMX was simply the canvas where that purpose was expressed and mirrored back to me.

But when identity fuses with a role you play or an emotion you feel, letting go doesn’t feel like change. It feels like death. Not metaphorically, but in the body, in your nervous system.

For three years, I continued training and pushing myself even after I stopped earning money from BMX. I justified staying by telling myself it was part of my brand. That it gave me access to rooms I otherwise wouldn’t enter.

I told myself:“I am a BMX athlete.”

That story narrowed my perception so completely that I couldn’t see beyond it. My purpose was trying to evolve and I could feel it yet the subconscious identity I had developed was trying to survive. This is what created a massive gap with the version of myself I was attempting to keep alive and present to the world and the version of myself I knew and felt inside. 

There was another layer too. One I didn’t admit for a long time.

Survivor’s guilt.

My brother Danny had died. Dave Mirra had died. I told myself I owed it to them to keep riding. That walking away meant letting them down along with all the other people who had battled brain tumors and TBI’s and were not so fortunate as I was physically and mentally to be able to do such things in life.

That belief fed the anxiety and it kept the identity alive. It gave fear a moral justification.

What I couldn’t see yet was that I was using the identity to avoid fear and grief, a common pattern with high-performing individuals. What looks successful and functional is a cover up for a deep insecurity. 

Survival Success Is Not the Same as Authentic Success

BMX rewarded my survival patterns perfectly.

When I felt uncertain about building my coaching business, I could escape into my space of mastery.

Familiar ramps.

Predictable sensations.

Adrenaline, dopamine, cortisol.

Control.

I could prove who I thought I was and reinforce the belief that this new path felt hard because I wasn’t enough yet.

Here’s the part that’s hard to see when you’re inside it.

That identity wasn’t truth. It was compensation.

A persona formed in moments of emotional threat, when my nervous system needed an explanation to feel safe. Fear, confusion, and the perceived loss of belonging created a conclusion about who I was. That conclusion began running the show.

This goes deeper than a limiting belief you can spot and challenge. It’s the identity program operating in the background.

The blind spot.

The mental prison.

It’s malware, not the computer.

You don’t upgrade the hardware.

You remove the program.

What I eventually saw was uncomfortable.

Much of my “success” had been fueled by fear.Fear of not being enough.Fear of letting others down.Fear of not being okay without performance.

That kind of success works.

But it comes at a cost.

Authentic success, for me now, looks very different. It’s nervous system–aligned and soul-backed. It’s the ability to hold peace and pressure at the same time. To feel intense emotion without being defined by it.

It’s knowing I am more than what I feel.

Grit Without Awareness Becomes a Prison

For most of my life, I believed pushing through everything was strength.

What I didn’t see was that I was bypassing the very signals my body and emotions were using to show me where I wasn’t free. They weren’t asking for more performance. They were asking for presence.

Enduring pain wasn’t just a skill, it was a feature of the prison.

I learned early on that success required suffering. That worth was earned through endurance. That rest, softness, or emotional presence were liabilities.

When I stepped away, the hardest adjustment wasn’t logistical. It was internal.

I didn’t know how to feel safe.

I had lived in a functional freeze state for so long that mental reframes, pushing through, and problem-solving became reflexes, not tools. My system associated success with pain and effort equaled worth.

To consider a life where success didn’t require constant suffering felt unsafe. My nervous system only knew how to succeed through endurance.

That’s how deep conditioning runs.

Grit gave me a career and awareness gave me my life back.

Just Because It Looks Good Doesn’t Mean It Feels Good.

From the outside, everything looked right.

Sponsors.

Fans.

TV and magazine coverage.

World travel.

And yet, I was dissociating through much of it.

Success became a mask. A way to hide struggle from others and from myself. I learned how to perform confidence while feeling increasingly disconnected from my own experience.

The applause got louder as my internal signal got quieter.

When I finally created space, a question surfaced that I had never allowed myself to ask honestly:

Do I even enjoy this?

Or am I addicted to proving something?

That question changed everything.

Because it revealed how easy it is to confuse external validation with internal fulfillment.

How often we stay in roles that look impressive while quietly abandoning ourselves inside them.

That mask became harder to maintain and required more and more….energy, results to validate it, opportunity to obtain the results that cost more energy, and it was addicting. 

Letting Go Is Self-Respect, Not Failure

Letting go didn’t mean erasing BMX.It meant honoring its role without collapsing my safety into a title.

Practically, it looked like slowing down enough to feel discomfort without overriding it. Setting boundaries where I once pushed through to please. Learning to work with my body instead of against it. Letting go meant detaching my identity from the outcomes the old identity needed to stay alive.

And something surprising happened.

I realized I could love something deeply and still outgrow it.

BMX will always be part of me. It shaped my discipline, worldview, and resilience. But I no longer need it to feel whole. Which, I’ve learned, is less about becoming something new and more about remembering who I was before protective personas took over.

For a long time, I believed walking away meant giving up. What I’ve learned is the opposite.

Walking away from what no longer aligns is one of the most courageous things you can do. I didn’t quit BMX. I honored the role it played. I chose acceptance over resistance. Presence over proving.

That’s not failure.That’s self-respect.

You Can Love Something Deeply and Still Outgrow It.

BMX will always be a part of me.

It shaped my discipline, my relationship with fear, and my ability to get back up after impact.

It taught me commitment, focus, and how to stay with something long after it stopped being comfortable. I’m genuinely grateful for the ride and for the life a bicycle helped me create.

But gratitude doesn’t require attachment and appreciation doesn’t mean obligation.

At some point, I had to confront a hard truth. I no longer needed BMX to feel whole. What once gave me expression had slowly become something I was using for certainty. A familiar structure I leaned on to feel safe in myself.

I don’t owe my life to a title, I owe my life to the version of me I’m becoming.

And that version isn’t a reinvention. It’s not a rebrand. It’s not a new identity to perform or protect.

It’s a remembering.

A remembering of who I was before achievement became armor. Before identity became something I had to defend. Before my sense of safety depended on what I could do, produce, or endure.

Outgrowing something doesn’t mean it failed you unless that’s what you want it to mean. It can mean it completed its role.

And the tension you feel when something no longer fits isn’t a sign you’re broken or ungrateful. It’s a signal that the identity holding it together has reached its limit.

That tension is where liberation begins.

Not by forcing a decision.Not by burning the past.But by questioning the invisible agreement that says, “If I let this go, I won’t be okay.”

That’s the moment worth slowing down for.

Because what’s actually asking to be released isn’t the thing you love.It’s the identity you attached to it in order to feel safe.

And that’s where identity liberation starts.

The Identity Liberation Process (How the Prison Dissolves)

For anyone who suspects they’ve outgrown a role, title, or identity but aren’t ready to walk away yet, this is the process I return to and use with clients.

Not to force change.

But to reveal illusion.

This is the Identity Liberation process, a dissolution-based framework designed to expose the identity assumption driving suffering and restore choice. Not a “work harder” process that only reinforces the fear, a process that dismantles the stories that keep the identity intact that’s keeping you stuck.

The 7 Core Questions:

1. Where do you feel stuck, limited, or looping in your life right now?

2. What does this suggest you’re not allowed to be, have, or do?

3. Where do you feel that in your body?

4. When did you first learn this was necessary to feel safe or be okay?

5. How does believing this shape how you live, perform, behave, or relate?

6. Without that belief, is there actually a problem here?

7. Without anything to prove, fix, or protect, what do you know right now?

This isn’t mindset work.

It’s exposure.

When the identity assumption is seen clearly, behavior reorganizes on its own.

You don’t force yourself to let go.You outgrow the need to hold on.

Liberated Path Forward

If you sense you’ve outgrown a role, title, or identity but aren’t ready to walk away yet, the work isn’t to force change.It’s to reveal what’s actually holding everything together.

This is where the Identity Liberation process comes in. Not to fix you.But to expose the assumption your nervous system is protecting.

When that assumption becomes visible, behavior reorganizes on its own.

You don’t let go by trying.You let go when there’s nothing left to hold.

Breaking up with my first love didn’t mean rejecting it.It meant evolving beyond collapsing my sense of safety into a role.

What I’ve learned is simple, but not easy:

You can honor what shaped you without letting it define you.You can appreciate the chapter without living in it forever.You can choose growth without betraying your past.

Clarity didn’t come from forcing answers.It came from telling the truth.

That’s the moment worth slowing down for.

— Josh P. 💚🧠✌🏼