“Doing as others told me,
I was blind.
Coming when others called,
I was lost.
Then I left everyone,
myself as well.
Then I found everyone,
myself as well.”
-Rumi 

#cominghometoself

2020 stripped me of so much of who I thought I was. I fell into dissonance with family, I felt disconnected from close friends, and I no longer had a ‘successful job’ to prop myself up on. Many of the biggest aspects of my life that I thought made up who I was, dissolved.

All my life, I had created a sense of self around my accomplishments and my success—my good grades, my academic accolades, my schooling, my job, etc…I was labelled as ‘smart’ from a very young age, which meant that I experienced traditional success throughout my life.  And that meant that I had to continue to experience and showcase success in order to be me, in order to be anyone worth anything. And when all that was gone, I was left to grapple with who I was. Throughout the past year, I did not experience the success that I had wished for. In fact, I struggled.  I struggled to get clients, I struggled to know how to be a good coach, I struggled to know how to help people, I struggled to know what kind of coach I wanted to be, I struggled to find my niche, I struggled to build my business as a solopreneur, I struggled with not achieving success, I struggled with every part of the process that I wanted so badly to not struggle with. I was lost and confused and fearful and ashamed. Because who was I if I was not successful? Who was I if my career was not covetable? Who was I if my parents were no longer proud of me?

And with the stripping away of my external identity, as terrifying as that was, a catalyst was then created to begin shedding layers of conditioning. I shed layers of expired beliefs that no longer serve me. I shed old identities, constructed by others, that kept me in small boxes. I shed patterns of conforming and living my life based on the path laid out that was not for me. So many of the things to which I had attached my false sense of self, my ego self, gone.

And it’s in the clearing that I get to see and experience the truth clearly.

Because with all the shedding, the removing of once was, there lies a void. An emptiness. An emptiness to be in, to exist in, to operate from that confuses and scares the shit out of the ego. And yet it is from this emptiness, this void, that there is space for growth. For transformation. For something new. For the truth to emerge. Through losing who I thought I was, I’ve experienced a deep sense of coming home to Self. Deeper than I’ve ever felt before. A sense of Self untouchable by labels or boxes and beyond false identities. A sense of Self experienced from within and a sense of self connected to the All.

As much as I hated it all as it was happening, as uncomfortable as it all was, I now see why it was necessary. Why I had to lose myself.

So that I could find myself.