I Want My Shot: Defining Moments and the Choices That Lead Us Back to Authenticity

Hamilton fans rap along to "I'm not throwing away my shot"... Eminem asks his audiences "if you had one shot...would you capture it, or just let it slip?”

Two very different media here – Broadway and Hip Hop – with essentially the same question: I have been given a moment. What am I going to do with it?

A defining moment is, at its core, a shot. Defining moments are the pivot points of a life. They are the events — large and small, chosen and unchosen — where something shifts inside us, around us, or both, and we are never quite the same after. They don’t announce themselves. They don’t always look significant from the outside. But in their aftermath, we find ourselves standing on different ground. And from that ground, we make a choice. That choice — or the absence of one — shapes the person we become.

Defining moments can emerge from joy or devastation: the birth of a child, the loss of a marriage, a promotion denied, a door that finally opens, a relationship that quietly ends. What they share is this: they demand something of us. And our response — from the time we were born into the families we were given (or, in my case, adopted into) through every in-between moment of adulthood — is what builds the architecture of who we are.

Dr. Phil McGraw, in Self Matters (2001), writes that our purpose is to “find, plug into, and live consistently with [our] core, authentic self.”

Everyone — every single one of us — deserves their shot at it. But who is that person, and how do we find them?

Roadblocks to Authenticty

Not all defining moments arrive with our consent. Trauma — whether rooted in early childhood or accumulated across years of adulthood — has a way of rewriting the story we tell about ourselves, often without our awareness. Neglect, poverty, abuse, medical crises, sudden loss: these are experiences in which we had no say. And yet, how we have learned to cope with them shapes so much.

In his controversial work The Body Keeps the Score (2014), Dr. Bessel van der Kolk explains how unprocessed trauma does not simply fade with time. It lives in the body. It can manifest as anxiety, chronic illness, emotional dysregulation, and a persistent sense of being cut off from one’s own life. Suppression, compartmentalization, minimizing (“someone always has it worse”) — these are all choices, however unconscious. While they may help us survive, they rarely help us thrive.

I once worked with a woman whose defining moment came on what should have been one of the most joyful days of her life. She was in labor with her first child — the nursery was ready, her husband was by her side, the car seat was installed (any parent knows what a triumph that alone is!). Then came the unexpected: a C-section was necessary. The spinal block failed. Due to the medications already administered, she could not speak. But she could FEEL everything. The medical staff recognized something was wrong. But the procedure was too far along to stop. The baby was delivered safely and is healthy and thriving. The anesthesiologist apologized afterward — sincerely, repeatedly — and expressed hope that the experience wouldn’t discourage them from having more children.

She just wanted to go home. She didn’t want apologies. She wanted to move forward, to forget. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression.

Her story raises a question that sits at the center of this conversation: when a defining moment leaves a mark that deep, how does anyone find their way back to themselves?

The Danger of Borrowed Narratives

When we are in the thick of a defining moment, we rarely know it. They don’t announce themselves or come with a warning label. They either sneak up and punch us in the face, or we don’t see it until after it’s happened. What we do, what we’re really good at, is adapt. We observe the behaviors around us. We absorb the consequences of our actions. We begin to label some things as a new normal, others as shameful, and we organize our perceptions according to what we believe is expected of us.

This is a natural human response to betrayal, hurt, and immense pain. But it carries a cost.

Over time, those adaptive strategies calcify into limiting beliefs and false narratives — stories that feel like truth but were written by our circumstances, not our character. And those stories have a way of keeping us exactly where we are, unable to move forward. I have a family member currently going through a lot of mental anguish over a breakup with an individual who was mentally ill, verbally and emotionally abusive. This family member has decided he needs "boundaries" now - which is fair - but it seems it's his answer to anything he’s accountable for. That’s his new narrative, which came from circumstances and a traumatic event. He’s choosing to be constantly on the struggle bus. He can get off that bus anytime he wants. He has an opportunity to make a true, authentic choice to find his confidence, let down his walls around his family who love him unconditionally, and turn the narrative around. When and what will it take for him to take his shot?  

Taking the Shot

It took me years to understand that my parents’ anger issues and probably mental health issues were never my fault — I simply happened to be there. The year I turned seventeen, I was handed a choice. An ultimatum, really. Teenagers without fully developed brains and executive functioning cannot and should not have to weigh that big of a burden. I took a leap I have never once regretted. At the time, it was scary...I had no idea if I was making the right choice. Every time I think about that defining moment, what I didn’t know then, and what I know today, is that that choice was the first time I did what was right for me and my authentic self.

People say: “Just jump in. You can’t ease into cold water — you’ll lose your nerve.” I jumped! I took my shot!

Reaction vs. Choice: Knowing the Difference

Spider-Man’s enduring wisdom — “with great power comes great responsibility” — takes on new meaning in this context. Dr. McGraw sharpens it: choosing to live reactively and passively, rather than actively pursuing your authentic self, “cheats you, the world, and everyone in it.” But here is where it gets complicated.

Empowerment alone does not guarantee authenticity. Sometimes what feels like a choice is, at its core, a reaction.

Consider the scenario of not getting an expected promotion. After months, perhaps years, of preparation, someone else was chosen. Your inner critic moves in immediately. You compare yourself to the person who got the role. You rehearse what you should have/could have done differently. And then you face what looks like "choices": confront your supervisor and demand answers; keep your head down and hope next year is different; polish your résumé and start looking.

These are choices disguised as reactions — driven by anger, avoidance, or self-doubt. Each one is a response to the pain of the moment, not an expression of who you actually are.

A true choice — one rooted in authenticity — requires something more: the willingness to pause and ask yourself four questions before you move:

•         What am I feeling right now?

•         What do I want to do with that feeling?

•         Who am I in this moment — and who do I want to be?

•         What truly matters to me here?

When you move through those questions honestly, you are no longer being pushed by the moment — you are leading yourself through it. You see your value clearly. You know what you will and won’t accept. You recognize who you want to be when life gets hard. And when you finally decide from that place, it carries a particular kind of confidence — because you know it’s yours.

The Real Work

Examining your defining moments is not easy work. It means sitting with the question of whether the choices you’ve made were truly yours, or whether they were the only ones you knew how to make at the time. It means asking whether the story you’ve been living is the one you actually chose — or one that was handed to you by pain, by fear, by someone else’s voice. That distinction matters. Because some defining moments get to be redefined! The meaning we assigned to an experience — especially one we had no control over — is not fixed, glued, and irreversible. It can be revisited. It can be rewritten.

The next time you find yourself at a crossroads, which could be a defining moment for you, pause before you act, if you can. Ask yourself: is this a reaction — something being pulled from me by emotion, by old habit, by a borrowed narrative? Or is this a choice — something coming from my values, my truth, my whole and unapologetic self?

Your authenticity is there. Every single day. Every single day is another chance. Take your shot.

“Just jump in. You can’t ease into cold water — you’ll lose your nerve.”