Sometimes at fifteen, sometimes much later, we finally stop running from ourselves. We sit down and ask the quiet but impossible question: Who do I want to be?

This conversation begins with a name. I first knew him as Michael — the professional veneer that felt safe, pronounceable, uncontroversial. But today he is Nachi, reclaiming the Hebrew name that always held the truer story of identity. That shift, simple on the surface, opens a portal into something tender and universal: how identity is shaped not by the roles we play, but by the courage to show who we really are.

Faith plays a profound role in that evolution. Nachi talks about Judaism not as dogma, but as structure, clarity, and purpose — a lens that helps him understand endings without fear and see value in existence itself. He points out that death, in his tradition, gives life its shape, its urgency, its meaning. Mortality becomes not the enemy but the clarifier.

We talk about rage, comfort, goodness, the pursuit of happiness versus the pursuit of pleasure, and the strange wisdom of a terminally ill teenager named Jonathan who taught Nachi how to be happy. We explore the liminal space between clarity and acceptance — how seeing ourselves honestly requires surrender to the things we cannot control, and gentleness toward the things we can.

This episode is about identity, yes. It’s about faith and behavior and clarity and death. But more than anything, it’s about permission: the permission to evolve, to reclaim ourselves, to choose again and again and again who we are becoming.

This is Headstone with Dr. Nachi Felt.