Sometimes Losing Yourself Is The Only Way To Find Yourself

It always happens that way. When one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong. “When it rains it pours.” I hate that expression. Probably because it’s so true. Unfortunately. And then it started pouring.

It felt like I had nothing. It was mediocrity at its best, really. A constant ellipsis with nothing to really come after it. No jump in the flat line feeling. I knew there was something more out there, but what? And how do I get there? I’d worked so hard for all of this, for all of these things, to be here. So, what a strange feeling it is when all the things you thought had filled you and defined you as a person, had become so colorless and was falling apart.

I remember better days. Days so long ago. I remember feeling like anything was possible, because with my heart and my mind and my passion for life I could become anything I believed in. I could fill my soul with the world. I could devote myself to happiness and creativity. This was my life. I was so confident about it. I was excited for so many things.

But something happened. And now, years later, I try to figure out what changed, and when. I don’t know. I used to live in the moment with my everyday interrupted by a new feeling that charged me, challenged me, inspired me. Nowadays, it seems, all I do is look to the past trying to feel even a glimpse of that light. I’d give anything to feel anything now.

People ask how I am. I shrug. Exhale. Whatever. It’s fine. Trudging along. It is what it is, ya know? How terrible, I think to myself, to have become someone I don’t even recognize. I missed exclamation points in my sentences. I missed having plans to believe in. A friend said I was different. Said there was something missing from the old me. He was right. And I wanted to be bothered that he said that, but there wasn’t enough in me to react. And then, finally, my moment had come.

And it only takes one moment. One breath. So I gathered together the blue muck of my mediocre life and decided, right then and there, and without a plan at all, to change. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t keep working a job that was killing me. I couldn’t keep dwelling on a love that would never come back. I couldn’t keep pretending that all these “things” in my life filled me. I couldn’t keep being so scared of what I really wanted just because I was terrified of failure. And so I quit. I let it all go. I decided to start over. And I refused to let the “idea of things” steer my new beginning. I didn’t want to have an idea about anything.

I just wanted to be free.

Was I being irresponsible? Because “not having a plan” could seem like that. I’d lose my insurance. I’d live off my savings. I’d eventually run out of that savings. And I might not be able to find another job right away. There was so much to worry about. Adult things. And what if? But at the same time, I really didn’t care. Waiting for this “right moment” to make a change, it doesn’t exist. The moment to make a change is everyone’s current breath. It is now. But only if you allow yourself to believe in it and fight for it. I wasn’t being irresponsible.

It was what I had to do, to potentially lose everything, in order to find myself again and redefine my truest happiness.

And so it was the first day of the rest of my life. I literally had nothing. And it was the most myself I’d felt in years, because it was the closest I’d been to that feeling I once was so obsessed with, when anything and everything was possible. I let go of all the negativity. I refused that numbness to settle in again. I even accepted the years I’d spent feeling so over everything, because it was the low I needed to help me see the world differently now. And in order to move on, to keep going, to color my life with new memories, new passions, and love I deserved, I needed to accept everything that didn’t go my way, learn from it, and keep on breathing.

Life, it will figure itself out.

But you have to want your best self. You have to want better. I just needed to scratch everything I’d known and start new to realize that. And so I go, with hands empty, but with my best story still yet to come.