How do we lose ourselves so completely without even noticing?
Because of the noise. The noise we never asked for and never wanted. The kind that started before we were old enough to question it, before we had words for what was happening or the power to walk away from it. The emotional weather of other people, handed down like heirlooms nobody wanted, worn anyway because no one told us we could take them off.
We didn’t lose awareness of love because we are broken. We lost it because we were busy surviving. And survival, as necessary as it is, asks us to go inward in a different way. To guard rather than open. To manage rather than feel. To shrink into whatever shape kept us safest.
It looked like people-pleasing so practiced it became personality. Like shrinking in rooms where you should have taken up space. Like laughing off the thing that just cracked you open. Like saying “I’m fine” so many times you forgot what not fine even felt like. Like carrying other people’s moods as if they were your responsibility, your fault, your job to fix.
Like losing yourself so gradually you didn’t notice it happening until one day you reached for who you were and found only the outline.
But here is what survival cannot touch, no matter how long it runs the show. The love was never removed from you. It was never revoked. It was simply buried under everything you had to carry. And buried things, given the right conditions, have a way of finding their way back to the surface.
This is what healing is, at its core. Not the acquisition of something new. The uncovering of something original. Something that was always yours.
You are not empty. You are not disconnected from love. The question was never whether it was there. The question was whether you could hear it over the noise.
And some of us are just now learning that the noise was never the truth. It was just loud. Truth doesn’t need volume. It waits. Patient and unchanging, it waits for the moment you get quiet enough to remember what you always were.
A vessel. A channel. A living, breathing expression of something far greater than the noise ever was.
You always were.
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