Every major threshold — graduation, marriage, loss, migration, vocation — is also an identity event, whether or not you treat it as one. The people who navigate transitions most fully tend to ask: who was I before this crossing, and who am I becoming, and what do I need to grieve? Ritual exists across cultures precisely because the psyche needs ceremony to mark the genuine endings and beginnings that secular life often rushes past.
Each step builds on the last.