Feeling Lost? - 5 Ways to Start Finding Yourself Again
Acknowledge where you are right now.
Recognizing and owning where you really are is step one. You have to know where you’re starting from if you’re going to figure out where you want to go. Acknowledging that you no longer know what your belief system, interests, or needs are can bring up a lot of grief. Figure out what you need to tolerate that grief. Give yourself some room to acknowledge what you’ve lost, and how far it feels like you have to go. It can feel unnerving to start without “a plan”.
This is the plan: being honest with yourself about where you’re starting from and allowing things to unfold.
Pay attention to what feels like you.
You might struggle to know what you like, or to find the energy or interest to try things you used to enjoy. Start paying attention. What makes you laugh, even if it feels weird or embarrassing? What do you have questions about? What do you want to know more about? What would you like to do more of?
This is information gathering, not the place for judgment or criticism about what you don’t know yet.
Let yourself try things without needing them to lead somewhere.
Have you ever talked yourself out of signing up for a class, reaching out to someone, or trying something new because you started listing all the reasons it probably wouldn’t work out? Sometimes we get so caught up in needing every step we take to yield something—a new hobby we love, a new best friend, a new direction—that we come up with reasons it isn’t worth trying before we’ve even given it a chance.
Not everything will be your thing. Not every person will be your person. That’s okay. Trying things out is how we work our way toward what we decide to keep.
Let yourself take things a little less seriously. Try something. See what happens. Shrug it off when it doesn’t go how you hoped. You’re allowed to experiment.
Work on your fear of messing it up.
Fear tries to take care of us by playing it safe. Unfortunately, if we become so afraid of messing something up, we can play it so safe that we miss out on all the wonderful things that come from being willing to make mistakes. I’ve never met someone who didn’t have a really good reason (read: experience) that taught them it wasn’t safe to make mistakes. And the only way forward (after creating necessary safety, such as in cases of abuse) is to build up our ability to tolerate messing up.
We will get it wrong sometimes. We will hurt someone’s feelings. We will make choices we regret.
Learning to tolerate mistakes goes hand in hand with learning how to repair, learning from what happened, and knowing we don’t have to be perfect.
Make decisions every day.
Decision paralysis is real. Movement is progress, even if we sometimes move in the wrong direction (I know, that’s the worst!). Some choices require more time and thought. Some really don’t. If you’re trying to rebuild your confidence in yourself, start practicing with the small stuff. Intentionally make decisions about something every day, no matter how small.
What do you actually want to do about dinner? Where do you want to go? Do you want to say yes to that event? And you know what? You don’t need to make the right decision every time.
You need to practice knowing that you can make a decision, live with the outcome, and adjust if you need to. That’s how you start trusting yourself again.
“Finding yourself” isn’t one big aha moment (although media tells us otherwise). It’s more about rediscovering and building on who you already are. It’s a process of layering one experience on top of the next. It’s experimentation.
It’s a working draft, except there’s no finished version waiting for us at the end. We get to keep reshaping it, revising it, tearing things out, adding new pieces, and rebuilding as we learn more about ourselves. We aren’t working toward a version of ourselves we can showcase as proof that we’ve “figured it all out.” We’re allowed to create a life that makes sense to us.
(Looking for therapy or counseling support? I see clients in Flower Mound, TX, as well as virtually throughout Texas and Utah, who are looking to rebuild after relationship troubles, blending families or remarriage, and/or deconstructing from high-demand religions or other systems.)
