February 26 2026

What Marks Your Identity?

Will Olympic athletes forever be known as Olympians? Or will gold medalists wear that title for the rest of their lives? Many will do great things beyond their competitive years, but what will be the mark that defines them? How about you? Is what you do, who you are? Does a career or an accomplishment, mark your identity? And are you content to let it?

It took five years after I retired, before I began saying “I’m a writer,” rather than, “I’m a retired physical education teacher.” My teaching career had a timeline. Once I hit the finish line, I was . . . finished. There is no such timeline for writers. Once a writer, always a writer. This profession called to me in the third grade. It quit calling for fifty years because I had convinced it I would pursue it after retirement. It called again when I bought a motorhome and started traveling.

What began as a retirement dream has become a second career—one that costs more than it pays and asks more of me than I ever imagined. With seventy-five blog posts behind me, one book published and a second underway, I can’t quit. I’m not writing because I have a large audience waiting, or a paycheck attached. I write because writers write. That’s what we do. Writing shapes me as much as I shape it.

My friend and mentor, Chip Bell, said it this way: “We write, not because we have to, not because we like to, but because we need to. It is part of who we are.”

Let me ask you, what I’m asking myself. What do you feel compelled to continue, even when it costs you? Why do you keep showing up? Is your work molding you into the person you hope to become? What marks your identity?

Perhaps the mark we leave begins with the work we refuse to abandon.