I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the times in our lives when we lose ourselves.  Or, perhaps more specifically, times when we lose the parts of ourselves that remind us of who we are.

I hear about this experience a lot from mothers navigating matrescence, of course.  But I think it happens at many – or even most? – of the times when we feel the tectonic plates of our lives shifting beneath our feet.

I have felt this myself, recently.  It happened in small, eroding ways, like it seems to do.  While my daughter has been healing from the spinal surgery she had back in October, she has been co-sleeping with me in my bed.  This started out as a necessity, because I had to get up every couple of hours to help her roll over.  My husband subsequently took up residence on the basement pull-out couch for what we thought might be a month, maybe two.

My office space, which is also the space where I take a hot cup of tea before dawn every morning and write by candlelight, spend time with my altar, read poetry or pull tarot cards, is in the basement next to where my husband is now sleeping.  And so, for what has now been three and a half months, I have not been able to gravitate toward my cozy den to reconnect with who I am and what matters to me.

It feels like a small thing – but losing yourself often does feel like a gradual tidal ebb, and you don’t notice your own absence at first.

Interestingly, this specific example of losing connection to a spiritual practice of some kind is one of the things that the matrescent mothers I work with often report as being the most surprising – and the most disorienting.  They thought it would be the sleep deprivation, perhaps, that untethered them in early motherhood, but in fact the loss of connection to a meditation, yoga, or journaling practice, for example, is what uproots them from their identity the most.

I’m writing to you now from my kitchen table.  I have lit a candle, yes, but its shadows flicker against the piles of unwashed dishes in the sink and the abandoned craft project my youngest child has left on the table across from me.  I’m not entirely sure when I’ll be able to return to my normal routines – and to the person I can be when I uphold them.  So, in the meantime, I’m going searching for myself.

I’m reminded of the Emily Dickinson prose:  “I’m out with lanterns, looking for myself.”  It’s something I’ve had to do plenty of times; it’s often the first thing I do with the clients I work with.

If the loss of self during a time of deep transformation or disorientation often happens in an incremental ebb, so too does the returning to oneself happen in micro-gestures of reclaiming.  It’s a deeper pull of crisp air into your lungs when you walk out the door in the morning.  It’s a moment to feel the full weight of your body, held by your mattress when you wake, whispering a tiny gratitude for the gift of another day. It’s searching the archives of your own selfhood for the things that look and feel and smell and taste like home.  A favourite book or poem, a loaf of bread in the oven, a skyward stretch when your body has been bundled up against the onslaught of daily life for too long.

I know, from having lost my way before, that I’m never actually that far away; that I can be called back to myself gently and quietly and daily.  I know that, not unlike other attachment relationships in our lives, it is often through rupture that the relationship becomes stronger.  It is through losing ourselves that we so often uncover parts that we have tucked away; parts that are yet undiscovered.

My friend, if you are lost to yourself right now, I’ll hold my lantern up for you, too.  I’ll hold that knowing, even when you can’t, that you are closer than you think.