Whitney Hanson shared a poem with one line that stuck out prominently to me: “Losing all I thought I was so I can finally be found.”  Over the course of the last several weeks I’ve felt lost in a way I couldn’t explain.  Between dealing with continuous nonsense at work, insecurities in my relationship, insecurities in myself, I’ve felt lost in the little bit of knowledge/feeling of who I am.  At first I found myself spiraling into the usual woe-is-me mentality because I’m tired of losing footing.  I’m tired of adapting all the time and still losing my ground.  That in itself made me feel sorry for myself because I’m tired of wasting all the energy and effort into something that feels so secure in the beginning and then tends to fall apart either from lack of follow through or from things literally fizzling out.  I always considered the idea that we shed who we are as we evolve and I still believe in that concept, but I never realized how quickly we could shed through those layers.  I spent a lot of my life looking for security because of the degree of loss and almost-loss that I experienced as a child–and it’s something I still do—not that we aren’t all looking for security, it’s just that I became compulsive about it because I feared losing everything all the time.  I witnessed the rise and fall of a successful family business, of starting out with my husband and having to go back home, of feeling secure and having the ability to go where I wanted to and then feeling trapped in work that was less than unsatisfying.

Now as I’m clearly in mid-life I need to consider the idea that there is a different reason to be lost, or to lose what we thought we knew.  Sometimes time speeds up like that to bring us to where we are meant to be faster—or at least to get us away from where we aren’t supposed to be.  I have a tendency to take things way too seriously, always finding the serious implications of what is “meant” to happen or what could happen from any little scenario—catastrophizing to a professional degree.  Sometimes the worst-case scenario happens to show us that we can survive the worst-case—or that the worst case isn’t really the worst case, we just built it up in our heads.  Doesn’t mean that the universe is trying to show us how bad things can get, it’s just trying to show us that we are stronger than we thought we were and that we have a tendency to create scenarios in our head.  Sometimes we are taken a different path so we can discover where we are meant to go.  We lock into this idea of how things are supposed to go and who we are because we buy into distraction and what others tell us.  When we lose that version we’ve created under the premise of what others told us to be, we learn to find who we actually are.  It always amazes me how something so simple as knowing who we are and what we want to do, what we are meant to do seems to evade most of us.  We have to allow new experiences so we can integrate them into who we are—and find who we really are.

Case in point of looking at a scenario that was the worst and can be viewed from another perspective is my relationship with my husband: when I found out my friend had been hanging out with him over 20 years ago, my initial reaction was literally, “What the fuck are you doing with that kid?”  I had more than one preconceived notion about who he was and I knew the person who I was at that point didn’t associate with people like that.  I never considered that he may have things to teach me or that I needed to have certain experiences with him.  I had to lose part of myself, give up part of my ideas of who I was in order to find those pieces that were really part of me.  I had to learn that sometimes we go through things in order to come out the other side.  This is how we find who we are: going through the experiences we think we can’t handle.  We hold onto homes, jobs, relationships, and what we think we know because we feel it gives us security without realizing that what gives us security is knowing who we are.  We can’t let jobs or circumstances define us no matter how hard it is to break out of those habits.  We never know what we will get until we go through it.  We can’t assume, we can’t pretend we know everything, and we can’t plan/prepare for everything.  WE just need to know who we are and not let circumstances tell us who we are.  We decide what we do next and how we view it. We can let ourselves be lost forever or we can learn to draw a new map.  Following our creativity, intuition, and knowing, we find our way out of where we are and into who we are meant to be.