I don't know when I started losing myself. I don't think there was one particular moment where it happened, or some obvious line I crossed where I could have stopped and said, hey, you're disappearing again. I think it happened the way these things usually happen, quietly and gradually, while I was busy loving, giving, trying, understanding and convincing myself that if I just tried a little harder, maybe things would eventually feel okay.
And now I'm sitting here wondering how the fuck I'm here again.
After everything I've survived. After all the times I've had to pick myself up and put myself back together. After spending so much of my life learning how to recognize the places that hurt me and promising myself I wouldn't lose myself there again. Somehow, I did.
For nineteen months, I fought for something I loved. I fought for them. I gave it everything I had, and maybe that's what hurts so much now. Not that I loved. I don't regret loving. I don't think I ever will. It's the realization that I gave so much of myself to something that still ended with me standing here, without them, trying to figure out where I went.
I don't have some beautiful lesson wrapped up in this yet. I'm not at the part where I can look back and say everything happened for a reason. Right now, some of it just fucking hurts. I'm angry. I'm heartbroken. I'm exhausted. I'm depressed in a way that feels deeper than sadness, and some days it feels like I'm looking at my own life from somewhere outside of it.
And underneath all of that, I miss myself.
I miss the woman who laughed easily. The woman who wrote because she had something to say, not because she was trying to make sense of the wreckage in her own head. I miss being excited about things. I miss having ideas and wanting things and making plans that were mine. I miss being able to sit with myself without feeling like I needed someone else there to make me feel whole.
I don't want to become some new, improved version of myself. I don't need to be inspirational. I don't need to turn every painful thing I've lived through into a lesson that makes other people feel better about it.
I just want to feel like me again.
Maybe that's where I am right now. Not healed. Not okay. Not even particularly hopeful some days. Just searching.
Searching through all the pieces of myself I've left behind over the years, trying to figure out which ones are still mine and which ones I picked up because someone else needed me to carry them.
And maybe that's enough.
Because for all the ways I've lost myself, I'm still here.
I'm still writing.
I'm still healing.
I'm still trying to find my way back.
And maybe I don't need to know exactly where I'm going yet.
Maybe I just need to keep moving toward the woman I know is still somewhere inside me.
Because I refuse to believe that after everything I've survived, this is where my story ends.
💜🫖 JustRealTea
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