The Woman Who Disappeared Into Her Own Life.

On the quiet dread of reaching for yourself and finding nothing there.

Maybe you can picture your children's futures with ease. You know what your partner is hoping for, what your parents need as they age, what everyone around you is moving toward. You have  spent years holding the shape of other people's lives in your mind, tending them carefully, making sure nothing gets missed.

But when you turn that same attention toward yourself, when you try to picture what you want your life to look like, who you want to become, what you are even moving toward, you find something unexpected.  Not fear. Not uncertainty.

Just blank.

And underneath the blank, if you stay with it long enough, something that feels a little like dread.

Sometimes you can be standing right in the middle of something beautiful and still feel like you are somewhere else entirely. Like you are there but not quite present. Watching your own life from a slight distance

You are not a woman who has given up. You are not depressed, not checked out, not ungrateful for what you have. You are, by most measures, doing everything right. You show up. You follow through. You are the person everyone counts on and you have never once stopped being that person.

Which is part of what makes this so disorienting.

Because you have been so good at being everything to everyone else that you never noticed. Maybe you never let yourself notice that somewhere along the way you stopped being anything to yourself.

Not dramatically. Not all at once.

Just quietly. Gradually. The way a room gets dark when the sun goes down and you don't realize it until you can't see anymore.

You may not be sure when it started. Not sure if there was a single moment. One thing you do know is that when someone asks you what you want, what you dream about, not what works for everyone else in your family, not what makes things easier, not what keeps the peace…you draw a blank. You never even considered that you were allowed to have an answer.

You have learned to see it as being easygoing.

 Not being high maintenance. Or too much.

You have learned to call it flexibility, selflessness, being a good partner, a good mother, a good daughter.

And maybe it really has been some of those things.

But sitting with that blank, that truth of not knowing yourself, or if you even could possibly know, you are beginning to wonder if it has also been something else. Something you don’t quite have a name for yet.

Here is what you know.

You are busy in a way that doesn't feel fulfilling. You move through your days taking care of everything and everyone. At the end of the day you feel like you have just gone through the motions. Every decision, every action was predetermined by someone else’s need. Your life is full, and from the outside may even look enviable. But from inside that life it feels disconnected, hollow, and lacking any connection to you.

There is a sense of being present for everyone else's life and somehow missing your own.

That is not a small thing. Even if it has felt small. Even if you have told yourself it doesn't matter, that other people have it harder, that you should be grateful for what you have.

It matters.

The ache is real even if you can't fully explain it.

You don’t need to have it figured out, or understand, it to be allowed to feel it.

You don’t need a diagnosis or a crisis or a breaking point to justify saying that something is missing.

You are allowed to notice the hollow feeling. You are allowed to sit with the dread. You are allowed to wonder who you are underneath all the doing, all the holding, all the showing up for everyone but yourself.

That wondering is not weakness.

That wondering is the beginning of something.

This series is for the woman who is still standing, still functioning, still needed and still quietly asking a question she hasn't said out loud yet.

Who am I when no one needs anything from me?

Over the next several weeks we are going to explore where that question comes from, what the actual cost is of leaving it unanswered, and what it might look like to start finding your way back to yourself.

You don't have to have it all figured out to keep reading.

You just have to recognize yourself here.

Take what you need. Leave the rest.

If something in this post stirred something in you, I would love for you to keep reading. And if you are curious about going deeper, the November retreat has a small number of spots remaining.

--A

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