Hi, I'm Dr. Maya Shankar, your guest host for the week.

Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday.

Today we're going to talk about the impact big changes can have on our self-identity.

We'll explore why we're so attached to the labels we give ourselves and that other people give us.

And how seeing our identities as more malleable can help us weather the storms that life inevitably sends our way.

My grandmother had played the violin in an Indian classical tradition growing up,

and when my mom immigrated to this country in the 1970s, she brought my grandmother's violin with her.

And I remember one day she went up to the attic and brought the violin down and she had only meant to show it to me,

but I immediately took to the instrument and asked my mom for a pint-sized violin of my own.

I immediately was on the fast track to trying to become a concert violinist.

When I was nine years old, I started studying at the Juilliard School of Music in New York,

and when I was a teenager, the violinist, It's a pro-men, asked me to be his private violin student.

And then one day, my dreams ended in a moment.

I had a sudden hand injury.

After which doctors told me I could never play the violin again.

And what I realized in that moment was that my identity was tethered to the violin, to being a violinist.

And so when I lost the ability to play, I really do feel like I lost a considerable part of myself,

and I wasn't really sure how to think about who I was or who I could be without it.

There's a concept in cognitive science called identity foreclosure, and it refers to the fact that we can lock ourselves

into a very specific identity in adolescence, but that actually can persist well into adulthood.

And looking back, I absolutely fell prey to identity foreclosure.

I was first and foremost a violinist.

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