You're mid-conversation and someone asks you to describe yourself, and the usual answers don't come. Not because you've forgotten who you are ? because the version of you that used to answer easily was built on a role, a relationship, or a routine that's currently in flux. This happens to almost everyone during a career change, a major loss, a stretch of burnout, or a sudden expansion into something bigger than you've handled before. It has a name: self-discontinuity. And it's more common, more disorienting, and more fixable than most people realize.

The Through-Line makes a sharp distinction most identity advice misses entirely: between the parts of you that are genuinely load-bearing ? your values, your characteristic responses, what you find meaningful ? and the parts that only feel essential because they're visible: your title, your role, your status. One of these can survive almost anything. The other can't, and confusing them is what makes ordinary change feel like losing yourself.

Drawing on research from personal identity philosophy and psychology, this book gives you concrete methods for locating your own through-line, carrying it intact through career transitions, relationship endings, crises, and rapid growth, and maintaining it deliberately so the next disruption doesn't catch you without a map. You already know who you are. This book helps you hold onto it.