Oh also the other idiom I had in my head for this whole selfhood transformation tied it back to that choking-self-heimlich thing and reflected this movie I remembered seeing on TV in the 90s about this man and woman who survived a plane crash but she was guilt-wracked cause her lap baby died and he would just do things with no fear of death or failure and succeed because of it

Anyway today I learned this movie, the 1993 Fearless, adapted from his book of the same name, was Matt Yglesias’ dad’s masterpiece