Photo by Noah Boyer on Unsplash
I recently wrote about how I lost my sense of belonging when I lost my sense of self. That abandonment didn’t happen overnight but incrementally over a number of years.
Here’s what that looked like for me …
In my late 20s, I was newly married with a new home and a new dog and working as an editor for a weekly magazine when my mom had a major stroke. My dad was already in declining health. When I wasn’t working to meet a deadline; working on the house with my husband, doing laundry, getting groceries, cooking, and helping care for our young rescue dog; oh, and keeping up with social commitments, I was driving 25 or so miles a lot of evenings after work and on weekends to visit my mom in whatever hospital, skilled nursing, or acute care facility she was in as well as trying to help my dad manage things at their home and making sure he was cared for and/or caring for himself.
Ten months after my mom’s stroke, my dad passed away. Then the focus of activity changed from maintenance (making sure my parents were cared for and OK) to management, which included moving my mom to my sister’s house 120 miles away; sorting through, packing up, and cleaning out my parents’ home of 30-some years and selling it to free up funds to support my mom; settling my father’s side of the estate, which had some complications; and setting up a trust and other appropriate legal paperwork for my mom to avoid a situation similar to my dad in the future. Oh yeah, and there was still my job, my marriage, the house, and the dog.
Through it all, I kept my head down and focused on getting through the day, making sure everyone and everything was taken care of, except me. It’s no surprise I had a PTSD episode that landed me in therapy for a short while. Although therapy was helpful in resolving the acute issue that resulted from the PTSD episode, I didn’t spend the time I should have working through the loss and overwhelm of the previous couple of years.
Life was busy and so I continued to just barrel forward in an effort to keep up with ...
Promotions at work that included more responsibilities, direct reports, and expectations
Adding a second dog to our pack
Managing a significant home remodel
Supporting my husband in starting his own company that later was acquired and required him to work out of state three weeks a month
Leaving my editorial career to start a cheesecake business
Moving from our Bay Area home to a small rural town further north in California
Managing a modest remodel of our new home
My mom passing away
Going to pastry school
Considering a cross-country move
My closest friend in my new hometown suddenly passing away
Cooking at a duck club and later working as a pastry chef at a fine dining restaurant while still working the cheesecake business
Supporting my husband’s job change, which required him to travel and spend a lot of time away from home
Buying some property and establishing part of it as an orchard while also building a brand-new home
Adding a puppy, making for three dogs
All of this and more happened in the 10 years since my dad passed away. Make no mistake, none of this happened without my consent. (Well, almost none of it anyway.) I made my choices along the way, sometimes by not making a choice and just allowing myself to be pulled along by the tide of life at the time.
It wasn’t until after the new house was built that the frenetic pace of life as I had been living it slowed down. Settled in and alone a lot of the time, I found myself with something I was unprepared for. Space. In the quiet, without myriad distractions, an uncomfortable sense crept up in me. For the first time in a decade (maybe longer), I realized I was discontented.
By all appearances, I had created a great life. As it turned out, though, it wasn’t a life I loved; a life that reflected me. I had created a life based on someone else’s vision. Because regardless of the choices I made—or didn’t make—along the way, I had forgotten one thing…
I matter.
Who I am, what I believe, and what is important to me mattered. When I lost myself, I lost the sense that I was worthy of what I wanted.
I had made many of my choices based on what I knew others wanted. I often mistook what someone else thought was important as being important to me. I had put my needs, wants, desires, and dreams on the back burner to fit into the life I thought I should have. And now I found myself in a life I didn’t love without any sense of who I was or what I wanted for myself.
As Hiro Boga says, “You return to belonging by trusting your own desires; by choosing your own way of being; crafting your own complex, creative, uniquely unfolding story.”
That’s what I had to do. I had to learn to trust my desires and choose my own way of being. And I did that one step at a time with a lot of help from others but also from myself, reconnecting with my true nature. Because belonging is an inside job.
Photo by Noah Boyer on Unsplash