The Cost of Losing Yourself
There’s something heartbreaking about watching the place that once felt like home slowly stop feeling safe.
It doesn’t happen all at once.
At least it didn’t for me.
It’s little moments.
Conversations that leave you questioning yourself.
A strange feeling you can’t explain.
Walking on eggshells.
Wondering if you said something wrong.
Trying harder.
Praying harder.
crying harder.
Eventually, my world became very small.
Without even realizing it, many of the relationships outside of church slowly faded. My husband and I spent more and more time within that circle. Those people had become our family.
Or at least, that’s what we believed…
Then life started changing.
Relationships became strained.
People came and went (even in the form of death).
Things felt… different.
I remember sitting with this uneasy feeling in my stomach, wondering why something that was supposed to bring peace suddenly brought anxiety instead.
When everything eventually fell apart, it happened in a way I never expected.
The details aren’t important.
They belong in the past.
What matters is what happened to me afterward.
I was devastated.
Not because I lost a building.
Not because I stopped attending church.
I was devastated because I had built so much of my identity around people that when everything crumbled…
I crumbled too.
The depression that followed was unlike anything I wanted anyone to see.
Most people had no idea.
I smiled.
I laughed.
I kept showing up.
But inside…
I was drowning.
There were days I questioned everything.
God.
My worth.
My purpose.
Even myself.
It reminded me of the darkness I experienced after losing my Aunt Sharonda.
Except this time…
The grief wasn’t over losing a person.
It was grieving the version of me that had disappeared.
For a long time, I thought healing meant finding another church.
But I wasn’t looking for another church.
I was looking for me.
The girl who who was audaciously herself.
The girl who wasn’t afraid to be different.
The girl who didn’t need anybody’s permission to exist exactly as she was.
Somewhere during those ten years, I had lost her.
And after everything fell apart, I had a choice to make:
Stay broken over what happened to me…
or go find that girl again.
And baby…
I went looking for her.
What happened next wasn’t about revenge.
And it definitely wasn’t about proving anybody wrong.
It was about rebirth.
It was about learning to love the woman I had been taught to question.
It was about realizing that maybe I was never too goofy, too immature, too different, too much, or not enough.
Maybe I had been enough the entire time.
In the final part of this story, I’m going to tell you what happened when I stopped asking, “Who do they want me to be?” and finally started asking:
“Shy… who do YOU want to be?”
And trust me…
the woman I found on the other side of that question?
She’s somebody I wish I would’ve met a long time ago.
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