I lost myself in college.
Not in some dramatic, rock-bottom way that makes a good story. It was quieter than that. I just slowly traded who I was for who I thought I needed to be. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to prove I belonged. And somewhere in all that proving, I stopped recognizing the person looking back at me.
I left college without becoming whoever I was supposed to become. That’s how it felt. Like everyone else had crossed some invisible finish line, and I was still standing at the start, wondering what I’d missed. So I did what a lot of us do when we feel like we’ve failed. I ran.
In my early twenties, I literally started running. But I wasn’t running toward anything. I was running away from a feeling. The feeling that I’d blown it. That I was supposed to be someone by now, and I wasn’t.
So I moved to California. New state, new job, fresh start. I figured maybe I’d left the lost feeling back home. I didn’t. I packed it in my suitcase and brought it with me.
I spent years searching. For meaning. For acceptance. For some sign that I was on the right track. I had this constant sense that I was behind. Behind who, though? Behind in what? I couldn’t tell you. I just knew I wasn’t happy, and I didn’t know why, and not knowing made it worse.
So I poured everything into the things that were supposed to fix it. Work. School. Earning more. I went and got my master’s degree, then a PhD. I made more money. I checked the boxes I thought would finally make the feeling go away. It didn’t go away.
That’s the part nobody warns you about. You can do everything “right” and still feel hollow. You can have the degree, the salary, the résumé that looks great on paper, and lie awake at night feeling like a stranger in your own life. And then my babies came along…
I’m telling you, children are the best teachers I’ve ever had. There’s nothing like a child to yank you straight out of your own “poor me” story. You can’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself when a tiny human needs you to be present. They don’t care about your PhD or job title. They care that you’re there. They have a way of showing you, without saying a word, how precious this one life actually is.
So in my thirties, I poured myself into them. All of me. And honestly? I lost myself again. A different kind of lost this time. The kind where you give so much to the people you love that you forget you’re a person too, with your own wants and questions and dreams collecting dust in the corner.
Now I’m in my forties. And for the first time, I’m doing something I never made time for before.
I’m asking the real questions. What do I actually want? Not what looks good. Not what other people expect. What do I want? Who am I, underneath all the roles and the proving and the running? Why am I here?
I don’t have it all figured out. I want to be honest about that. But I’ve stopped running. I’ve stopped chasing the next box to check. And in the quiet that’s left, I’m finally starting to hear my own voice again.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe. Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself. The losing isn’t the failure. The losing is part of it. You have to get lost enough times, in enough ways, to finally get tired of being someone you’re not. So let me turn this toward you, because that’s really why I’m writing it. Where are you right now?
Are you living your life, or a version of it that someone else expected of you? When you picture what you want, is it actually yours, or did you inherit it from a parent, a partner, a culture that told you what “making it” looks like? When was the last time you sat with yourself, no phone, no noise, and asked what you actually want? And the big one… Do you even know who you are? Not your job title. Not your role as a parent or a partner or the dependable one everyone leans on. You.
I’m not asking to make you anxious. I’m asking because I spent two decades not asking, and I don’t want that for you. You don’t have to have the answers today. I sure don’t. But you do have to be willing to look. So look. Honestly. Take the time I waited way too long to take. Because the life you actually want is still in there. You might just have to get a little lost to find your way back to it.
Comments +