It’s very easy to loose yourself in your identity by connecting who you are to what you do.
In your transition from adolescence to early adulthood you heavily identified with solely being a basketball athlete. Only after you moved away from the game did you realize how dangerous that mentality was. While it may have helped you develop an obsessive work ethic to be the best you could be, it hindered your ability move on once it was time to detach and let go from that identity.
While you’ve found relative peace and solitude in that past version of yourself, understand that you’re identity — you’re perception of who you are, is a fleeting fluid concept. Being rigid in your identity only slows you down from moving forward in the long run. There is only one solution:
Constantly challenge yourself to evolve and grow: Re-create yourself.
Every version of yourself has a purpose for a specific time, but like everything, it must inevitably come to an end. Growing requires constant death and re-birth — this cyclical nature invites the identity to be remodeled. But only if you allow it to change. Only once you allow old parts of yourself to die and new forms to be resurrected can a more integrated intelligent self created.
Ideas inspired by Kobe Bryant and Elliott Hulse.