What Is the Defining Moment of Your Life?

The answer to this question says a lot about you.

What has been the most defining moment in your life?

I bet I could tell a lot about you based on your answer to this question.

Some of you will answer with a joyful event that shaped you into the person you are today — the birth of your child, the launch of your business, the attainment of a big goal.

Others, however, will point to a traumatic event — a near-death experience, a tragic medical diagnosis, or the loss of someone dear to them.

These are all life moments, but defining life moments are laced with emotion. And that emotion depends on the narrator’s perception of the event. (For example, one person may say a near-death experience made them paranoid and fearful while another may say it made them loving and grateful.)

I recently wrote about how no one single event will transform your entire identity because we have a multitude of layers that make us us.

But, as humans, we have a very hard time accepting this. We often can’t make our brains understand that people can be two (or three, or four) things at the same time. We want simplicity while we resist ambivalence.

And because we want that simplicity, one moment can dominate our entire life — for the rest of our life. But it’s not really our fault. Our brains sometimes get stuck in a loop that replays the moment like a broken record.

In a recent New York Times feature, writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner says this about trauma:

“I’ve now come to understand the same thing about trauma: Happy, well-adjusted people are all different. The traumatized are exactly alike.

“I’m about to tell you a story that is nothing like a violent kidnapping — almost laughably so — but what I’ve learned over the years is that trauma is trauma. Something terrible happens, beyond what is in our own personal capacity to cope with, and the details don’t matter as much as the state we’re thrown into.

“Our bodies and brains have not evolved to reliably differentiate a rape at knife point from a job loss that threatens us with financial ruin or from the dismantling of our world by our parents’ divorce. It’s wrong, but explain that to your poor, battered autonomic nervous system.”

Brodesser-Akner tells the story of the painful, invasive, and traumatizing birth of her first child. She says that she never got over it, never stopped being bitter about it, and never quit worrying about the impact it had on her son.

“I had been rocked into a full nervous breakdown, and I had no idea what aspect of the birth did it, she writes. “All I knew was that, should something go wrong — a car accident, maybe, or a mugging — I would be prone to falling apart.”

Her son’s birth transformed from a moment into a defining moment with tentacles that touched every aspect of her life.

Now, let’s take a look at someone else.

Last week, I included a profile about a skydiver named Emma Carey who survived a 14,000-foot fall when she dove out of a helicopter into an empty cow pasture in Switzerland, with two tangled parachutes and her instructor passed out on her back.

The reporter writes:

The skydiving story is just a story, and [Carey] wrestles with how much longer she wants to keep telling IT. She wants to talk about her.

It's human nature to make a story about you into the story of you, and most of the time feels harmless. Think about how many people whose identities are subsumed going from Justin and Maria, to "Justin & Maria," to Mom and Dad, to Grandma and Pap. Everybody has a friend whose marriage falls apart and he suddenly becomes "Divorced Dave," or a cousin who has borrowed money from everybody in the family and therefore is "Broke Brooke." We connect people with one of their stories, and a chapter about them becomes the book on them.

But who wants to be simplified down to one thing about themselves? This is especially problematic for people with trauma and disabilities. Most of us have said "Heather is paralyzed" or "Mike is autistic" without thinking twice, with no ill will. But there's a reason why those affected often prefer person-first language -- Mike isn't autistic, he has autism. He also has a dog, a job, a guitar and an on-again, off-again relationship. Nobody says "Mike is guitar." And if they do, they probably shouldn't.

As the writer notes, who wants to be simplified down to one thing about themselves? Who wants one moment to become the moment of their life?

Carey survived the impossible, but understandably, she wants to move beyond it. She doesn’t want to be the girl who “fell from the sky” for the rest of her life.

I got curious. I went to her Instagram to see how she’s moved on. How she’s told the story of her. How she hasn’t let this traumatic moment become the defining moment of her entire life.

The first thing I notice is her bio: “Emma Carey: The girl who fell from the sky.”

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