I Didn’t Realize How Much of My Identity Was Built Around Repetition

On bodybuilding, injury, and what happens when the structure that shaped you disappears

For six years, my life moved in cycles.

Build. Cut. Compete. Repeat.

And I loved it.

There was something deeply grounding about the structure of it all. The training blocks. The macro tracking. The cardio sessions. The posing practice. The constant refinement. Every phase had a purpose and every day felt connected to something bigger I was building toward.

When I decided to go for my pro debut, it wasn’t some impulsive goal. I earned my pro card and it seemed like the next logical step. I spent over a year intentionally building muscle first. Purposefully gaining weight so I would have more muscle once I started the cut. Then the cut finally came and everything narrowed into focus. The food got tighter. The cardio increased. Physically and mentally, I was locked in.

A few weeks into the cut, I got injured.

And what’s strange is that I don’t think I understood right away what I had really lost.

At first, it just felt like a disruption. Annoying. Temporary. Something to rehab and push through so I could get back on track.

But it didn’t work out that way.

It took sixteen months to finally get answers and ultimately surgery. Sixteen months of trying to work around pain, trying to adapt, trying to convince myself I could still hold onto some version of the path I had been on.

Except the path kept getting further away.

The hardest part wasn’t even the physical injury itself. It was that the version of me I recognized started disappearing too.

My body changed. I gained weight I never planned on carrying because the original plan had been interrupted halfway through. I managed to lose some of it later, but even now I still don’t fully recognize myself sometimes. Not just physically either. Internally too.

And I think part of what made all of this so disorienting is that bodybuilding was never just a hobby for me.

For six years, those cycles quietly shaped my life. They shaped my routines, my decisions, my discipline, my relationship with my body, my sense of progress, even the way I measured time. There was always a next phase. A next target. A next version of myself I was working toward.

The repetition itself became stabilizing.

I knew who I was inside that structure.

Then suddenly I wasn’t.

I remember a conversation with my son after the injury and him saying, “Mom, who are you trying to prove something to? We get it. You’re a badass.”

And honestly, that question stayed with me because I didn’t fully know how to answer it.

Who was I trying to prove something to?

Myself?
Other people?
The imaginary “they” so many of us carry around without ever really identifying?

I still don’t fully know.

What I do know is that this experience has forced me to notice how much identity can get built through repetition without you even realizing it’s happening.

Not achievement alone. Repetition.

Showing up every day. Following the structure. Tracking progress. Moving toward something consistently enough that eventually it stops feeling like something you do and starts feeling like who you are.

And when that disappears, there’s no clean emotional transition for it.

People talk about injury like the hard part is not being able to train. But for me, the harder part has been figuring out who I am while living outside the rhythm that shaped me for so long.

Now I’m ten days post-op from surgery looking at another six to nine months before I can return to sport.

And honestly, that timeline hits differently now.

For a long time, I think I viewed recovery as a bridge back to the woman I was before all of this happened. Like the goal was to return to some previous version of myself if I just worked hard enough, healed well enough, stayed disciplined enough.

But somewhere along the way, that started shifting too.

Because after enough time passes, enough changes happen, enough versions of you fall away, you start realizing there may not be a way to go back fully.

And at this point, I’m not even sure I want to.

I don’t mean that in a hopeless way.

I just think this experience changed me. Not only physically, but in the way I see myself, the way I relate to goals, the way I measure who I am when there isn’t a clear finish line in front of me.

For six years, repetition gave me a strong sense of identity. I knew who I was inside those cycles.

Now I think I’m learning who I am outside of them too.

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