Rediscovering Selfhood

There are moments in life when you suddenly realize you’ve drifted far from who you once were. Mine came one afternoon while watching my niece draw in her notebook — completely absorbed, completely confident, completely herself.

As I watched her, something in me ached. I remembered my own childhood afternoons spent coloring Lisa Frank pages or shaping flowers out of air‑dry clay. I remembered the joy, the focus, the certainty. And I wondered: Where did that version of me go?

Maybe you’ve had a moment like that too — standing in the middle of a mundane task, checking your email for the third time, walking the dog, riding the bus home after a long day — when a quiet voice inside asks, What am I doing? And why?

Life has a way of pulling us into roles and expectations before we even realize it’s happening. Work. Family. Survival. Timelines we never chose. Identities we inherited rather than created.

I spent years doing what I thought I was supposed to do. I went to college because it was “the next step.” I studied Elementary Education because I’d spent my childhood babysitting cousins and thought that meant I should teach. I worked in the public school system because my students needed me — even when I felt powerless to give them what they truly deserved.

When I shifted into librarianship, I hoped it would be different. And in many ways, it was. I met families who became like my own. I witnessed the magic of learning — a child falling in love with reading, an older adult mastering the public scanner. I saw how community can hold people.

And yet, beneath it all, there was a quiet, persistent sense of performing a role. Of showing up as the version of myself that the job required, not the version that felt true.

The truth is: we become who we need to be to survive.

Motherhood, work, caretaking, crisis — they shape us. They harden us. They stretch us. They ask us to put parts of ourselves away “for now,” until “later,” until “things calm down.”

But sometimes “later” never comes.

Naming that loss — the loss of your own self — is both grief and relief. Grief, because you finally see how far you’ve drifted. Relief, because awareness is the first step home.

At some point, I had to ask myself a question I had avoided for years:

Do I want to keep surviving, or do I want to start living?

I chose me. My well‑being. My authenticity. My inner peace.

And if you’re reading this because you feel that same distance from yourself — that quiet ache, that longing — I want you to know this:

It’s not too late.

We may never return to the carefree girls we once were, but we can become the women we were always meant to be.

This is the beginning of the return.