You Go Abroad To Find Yourself. (I Lost Myself Instead)
I’m not sure if I can properly explain the process of my world falling apart. Many spiritual teachers have tried before me and done so in much more elegant and eloquent ways. The best way I know to describe it is like I’d spent my whole life reading one book. I was comfortable with it; I knew it by heart. I carried it with me everywhere.
Then someone tore it out of my hand, put a blindfold on me, gave me a book in braille, upside down, and said “now, read this; this is what’s real”.
It was that disorienting.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s impossible to tell this story linearly, though our minds like neat, straight things. I’ll do my best to make it sensible nonetheless.
Looking back, the moment my reality really began to disintegrate — sand to a windstorm — was the moment I asked myself “Who Am I?” and my mind answered with a complete blank.
It was a very organic moment of panic and confusion.
I was on the phone with my mother. We were talking about my decision to leave New York for London after I’d graduated. It was a last minute decision, a process I had deliberately left her out of, and she was understandably hurt.
I was trying to explain just how important it was for me to go; I needed to leave. I felt it in my bones. I felt like if I didn’t go, I’d be missing out on an incredible opportunity to change my life in ways I’d never anticipated (spoiler alert: I was right). More than that, and this I did not say, I needed to be away from people. My soul was crying out for solitude.
Everything in my life felt like a responsibility: my friends, my family, my necessary job search. It all inexplicably weighed on me. I say inexplicably because I do know how privileged of a position I was in.
Nothing was really wrong. By all accounts, externally, I was doing fantastically. I’d just graduated with my second degree. I had a beautiful community of supportive and loving friends. I enjoyed New York. I loved my apartment.
It’s just that in the moment, it all made me so tired. Something was calling me deeper and away.
Go, it said. Let all of this go.
While I’d travelled before it was always with the intention of returning home. I’ve always had a bit of wanderlust, but I’d never gone with the thought of staying away, of charting out a path for myself that included thousands of miles between myself and my family.
Without going into too much detail, I’ll set the stage for you here and say that I’d always been a pretty responsible kid. From a young age, even when I didn’t need to, my mother says I was trying to take care of her. She used to tell me she was the Mom, not me. After my sister was born, I was trying to take care of them both.
We all have our things, right? We all internalize narratives as children. One of mine, informed by a number of realities in my life, but not necessarily true was that I had to be a caretaker.
This meant that I needed to protect other people from my feelings. I needed to absorb their pain and help them cope. It was my job to make sure they were okay, often by ignoring my own emotional well-being. Giving became my gauge for whether I was being “good” or not, whether I was doing the “right” thing.
Some of this was a very real and deep sense of empathy that I’ve always had. Some of it was learned from my mother, who is endlessly compassionate. Some of it was trauma. Some of it was guilt and shame embedded in so much of the Christian doctrine that I grew up with.
Some of it, I’m sure, came from having a largely absent father, who I felt I needed to protect from his own sense of inadequacy. No need to go too far down that rabbit hole. There is no blame to lie at anyone’s feet, no fault here (Forgiveness, I found, is the price of freedom, but more on that another time).
The point is that from a young age, I’d built my identity, my world, on this as a foundation. I was a Helper.
In the context of this, going to London was definitely not the right thing to do. I don’t mean it wasn’t right for me, because it was. It just wasn’t, seemingly, according to every rule I’d ever followed, the morally “right” call.
My mom was asking me to stay; she rarely asked anything of me. But here she was, saying she needed my support with my younger sister, and needed me close enough to home to not be an extra worry to her. My roommates, incredibly dear friends, had been given little warning of my departure, and were on some rocky ground at the time themselves.
I didn’t have a secure job or even any prospects in London. It didn’t really make sense. It didn’t look like the right thing to do and it inconvenienced everyone around me. In my world it was, at its a core, a completely unreasonable, selfish decision.
In the moment I told my mom that I was going anyway, even when she asked me not to, I felt something in me collapse. I couldn’t tell you the exact words anymore that ended that call, because all I remember is the profound sense of loss and grief that overcame me immediately after. I started sobbing.
Big, heaving things. I must have cried for hours. And the question that repeated in my mind was “Well then, who am I?” “Who am I, then?”
If I was not the daughter that stayed, if I wasn’t the sister that chose to support her family, if I wasn’t the friend that made everything easier, then Who. Was. I.
And I got no answer. Just complete silence.
That was the beginning.
…
Or maybe the beginning was when I met the guy who would ultimately break my heart. Or maybe the beginning was the process of healing that began when I went into therapy for the first time in years.
Who knows anything of beginnings or endings, really? The important part is that moment when I first clearly felt the sense of self I had created leave me. I looked at it and it wasn’t real. I looked at it and it wasn’t mine any longer. It wasn’t me anymore.
What often happens in moments like this is that we see it and then we bury it. Our minds don’t know how to process the loss of self and emotionally it can feel overwhelming, to say the least. So, instead of realization, there’s a sort of half-acknowledgement and then we find something, anything, to focus on instead. We fill the space with other things. We distract ourselves from the truth. Humans are very very good at that.
For whatever reason, I don’t pretend to know it, I did not bury it. I couldn’t bury it. Instead, I clung to the feeling that this move was necessary. I doubled down on the fact that, despite not knowing who I was if I didn’t fit who I’d always been, who I would be must be on the other side of this decision.
I let go and took the leap. And though it felt as if my world had fallen apart, nothing catastrophic happened externally. No one was hurt in any lasting way, except for my ego. Nothing was lost, except for my false sense of self.
My community remains intact and larger than ever. My relationship with my mother is stronger, deeper and more vulnerable than I think it has ever been.
I came back to Brooklyn in August of 2020 to a new apartment, a space of my dreams to create and thrive within.
We think when we let go, we’re risking losing everything, when in fact, our fear gets in the way of all we stand to gain when we challenge those deeply held constructs that say we have to be a certain way to be accepted and acceptable.
Sometimes making the “wrong” decision is what leads you to the right path.
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