Are you limiting yourself?
What we can learn from a French singer and an American physicist
Last Wednesday, I was braving a storm to Malaga, Spain, so I didn’t get to publish my regular post. But the sun is up again, and the post is ready today. At the end, I am including some pictures from Southern Portugal, the Algarve region.
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We all have limitations and challenges - physical, mental, circumstantial. Most people, more or less, figure things out and move along through various life experiences without becoming their limitations. To their bewilderment and sometimes frustration, others define their entire existence by their limitation stories.
I am talking about the person who introduces and excuses themselves with a condition they have, or with something that happened to them a long time ago. Imagine a depressed relative who claims to have “tried everything and nothing helps.” They even seem to think of melancholy as a sign of intellectual credibility, or as evidence that they feel and care more deeply than others. Some even develop arrogance around their depression and feel entitled to special considerations.
You might know someone diagnosed with anxiety. At first, the diagnosis is a relief because it explains panic attacks, avoidance, and exhaustion. But over time, they start thinking of themselves and introduce themselves as “an anxious person.” They pre-emptively opt out of opportunities and expect friends and family to make special adjustments for them.
Some people get diagnosed with adult ADHD. They learn some tools, get medication, and feel some relief. But after a while, they begin to excuse their poor follow-through and planning, with the condition, blaming everything they mess up on “this is just how my brain works.” They expect lower relational accountability and pre-emptively seek forgiveness to avoid taking responsibility.
Some people who have experienced genuinely traumatic events seem to get stuck in a “what happened to me” loop and begin to organize every decision they make around it. For them, trauma explains their underfunctioning, boundaries, and relationship challenges long after the danger is gone, and they treat the psychological injury from trauma as an irreversible diagnosis akin to losing an arm or a leg.
A professional may define themselves by working long hours, being busy, and even by their exhaustion. Burnout becomes a badge of honor. A person with a chronic illness may define themselves by their limitation and purposefully avoid anything that could help them get better. Another one considers themselves “unlucky in love” and makes sure to chase away all good options. Someone else grows up in scarcity and remains there psychologically, regardless of how much money and resources they have. Others are in a permanent state of political resistance and activism.
I don’t want to invalidate people’s experiences, nor do I want to judge anyone. I do want to point out the process of “becoming” that which limits us, and the continuous choice to identify as the person who IS the limitation, thus causing ourselves more and ongoing suffering than the original condition.
Which brings me to Edith Piaf, the iconic French singer from the 1940s, known as The Little Sparrow. She wrote and sang what became her signature song:
Her story illustrates my point. She grew up in extreme poverty and sang for coins on the streets of Paris. When the nightclub manager Louis Leplee first “discovered” her in the mid-1930s, she had no proper stage clothes, no wardrobe, no money, no image. The story goes that for her first official club performance, she had to sew her own dress from hand-me-downs and was unable to finish it, so she showed up on stage with one sleeve.
This stark, simple black dress became her signature outfit. Nothing flashy or distracting, but also nothing luxurious. Her poverty defined her style, and that style became her identity. The black dress turned into her expression of authenticity, seriousness, moral gravity, and artistic purity.
Later in life, after she became famous and wealthy, she refused to change out of loyalty to suffering. It might seem trivial when it comes to stage outfits, but this same attitude persisted in the entirety of her life. Her early hardship gave her credibility and her intensity.
But it also locked her into a painful paradigm. She saw pain as truth. In her view, unless something hurts, it’s not real. Love wasn’t real unless it was devastating. Art wasn’t true unless it cost her physically or emotionally. Her audience reinforced this by revering her wounds, interpreting the rawness as honesty. The pain became her defining emotion.
Diviating from pain ceased to be an option because it meant she was no longer authentically “herself.” It meant betraying not only her style but her music lovers and their expectations of her.
Piaf grew up in poverty, neglect, violence, and unpredictability. Chaos was life for her, and it created multiple pain points. As an adult, she continued to live in these familiar ways despite her means, which reliably recreated pain, intensity, and emotional extremity. She gravitated towards unavailable or doomed partners and cycled in and out of fast, consuming, and destabilizing relationships. The death of “the love of her life” in an airplane crash while on his way to see her didn’t help either.
From her 30s onward, Piaf lived in near-constant bodily distress. She survived several serious car accidents and was left in chronic pain, having to endure long hospitalizations and continuously deteriorating health. She developed a morphine addiction, initially prescribed to her for pain, and became an alcoholic by today’s standards.
All of this while she kept a relentless and taxing touring schedule, always exposed to the public with very little time for herself. She became the performer of pain and suffering, living emotional extremes to sing about them.
According to her songs, she regretted nothing:
Interestingly, the French Foreign Legion adopted this song during the Algerian War, further enhancing its reputation as an anthem of endurance and defiance.
We don’t know if her musical career would have been different if she hadn’t suffered as much as she did. But we do know that she suffered a lot and refused to reinvent herself or change her life. She could have. She didn’t because the chaos and suffering were no longer happening to her. She became them.
If Edith Piaf illustrates identity fusion with suffering, Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist living with ALS, illustrates the exact opposite. Hawking refused to center his identity on tragedy. He was diagnosed with ALS at 21 and given 2 years to live with progressive paralysis, loss of speech, mobility, and privacy. Yet psychologically, he framed ALS as a logistical problem, not a metaphysical one. He saw his illness as context only.
Instead of focusing on the inevitability of his deterioration and dependency, he built a long academic career and created stability around himself as an antidote to the illness’s instability. Not only did he outlive his diagnosed demise by 50+ years, but managed to get married twice and have three children. He also made significant contributions to theoretical physics, most notably the discovery of what became known as Hawking radiation (the radiation emitted by black holes previously thought to be completely “black”).
He lived with extraordinary limitations, but did not organize his sense of self around them, and became famous for proving that even the most absolute limits in nature are not as final as they appear.
Why do some people become psychologically dependent on their limitations?
There are five reasons this happens. They are hard to hear for people who have already fused their identities to a limiting story, because it will sound like victim-blaming to them. But they are real and worth considering.
