"You didn't lose yourself. You just forgot who you were while you were trying to survive."
You are not broken because you do not recognize yourself anymore. You adapted. You built a survival version of you to get through what you were never meant to carry alone. Remembering yourself is not about becoming someone new. It is about coming home.
There is a quiet grief that comes with looking in the mirror and thinking, “I do not even know who I am anymore.” You remember a version of you who was softer, sillier, more hopeful, more creative. Somewhere between the breakups, the family drama, the burnout, the financial stress and the constant pressure to keep it all together, that version of you feels like they disappeared. It is tempting to say, “I lost myself.” But that is not fully true. You did not lose yourself. You went into survival mode.
Survival mode changes your behavior because it has one job. Keep you safe. It does not care if you feel fulfilled, expressive, or aligned. It cares that you wake up tomorrow. So you became hyper responsible. Or hyper independent. Or hyper accommodating. You swallowed your opinions to avoid conflict. You overworked to feel secure. You stayed loyal to situations that were slowly draining you because leaving felt more dangerous than staying. None of that means you are weak. It means your nervous system did everything it could with what it had.
When you spend years in that state, the survival self can start to feel like your entire identity. “I am just the strong one.” “I am just the anxious one.” “I am just the caretaker.” Underneath those titles is an actual person who existed before life demanded that much from you. The one who liked certain music for no reason. The one who could get lost in a hobby without turning it into productivity. The one who laughed from the stomach and did not immediately scan the room to see if it was “too much.”
Healing is not about erasing the survival version of you. That part kept you alive. It deserves respect, not shame. The work now is helping your body learn that survival mode does not have to run the whole show anymore. Safety can come from honest boundaries instead of people pleasing. Security can come from self trust instead of constant overworking. Connection can come from being known, not just being useful. As that safety grows, small pieces of your old self will start to peek through.
You do not need to “find” yourself in some distant, perfect future. You need to create conditions where your real self feels safe enough to come out again. That happens one choice at a time. The first time you say no without a five paragraph explanation. The first time you rest without earning it. The first time you let someone see you sad without immediately saying “I am fine.” Every one of those moments is you remembering. You are not lost. You are layered. And you are allowed to come back to yourself at your own pace.
