There is a kind of loss that does not involve death, but it kills you slowly anyway.
It is the loss of yourself.
The quiet kind.
The kind that happens piece by piece while you are too busy trying to be enough for everyone else.
I used to shrink myself to fit into spaces that did not deserve my light. I would silence my own voice to keep the peace, dim my own flame so no one felt uncomfortable standing next to me. I became whoever people needed.. The listener, the healer, the forgiver, the one who “understood.” Until one day I looked in the mirror and realized I did not recognize the woman staring back. Her eyes were tired. Her smile was rehearsed. Her soul felt like an empty room.
That is when it hit me.. I had abandoned myself.
Not suddenly, but slowly.
Every time I said “I am okay” when I was not.
Every time I put someone else’s comfort above my own truth.
Every time I convinced myself that peace meant silence, when really it was suppression.
Losing yourself does not happen with noise, it happens in the quiet moments where you stop fighting for you. And by the time you notice, you have become a stranger wearing your own skin.
Finding myself again was the most painful resurrection I have ever lived through.
There was no applause, no guidance, no map. Just me.. Raw, broken, and stripped of every identity I had built around other people’s expectations. I had to sit with the guilt of choosing myself. I had to grieve the versions of me that survived on crumbs of love. I had to forgive the girl who thought she had to earn her worth.
Healing was not pretty.
It was crying at 2 a.m. because I did not know who I was without pain.
It was saying “no” and shaking because I was terrified someone would leave.
It was deleting numbers that once felt like lifelines.
It was walking away from people I loved because they only loved me when I was small.
But every boundary I built brought me closer to peace.
Every tear I cried was a cleansing.
Every lonely night taught me how to hold my own hand again.
I found power in solitude, not the lonely kind, but the sacred kind.
The kind where silence becomes sanctuary.
The kind where you hear your own voice again and realize it had been begging to be heard.
And now, after everything, I have made myself a promise..
I cannot afford to lose me again.
Not for love.
Not for validation.
Not for belonging.
Because nothing is worth the price of self-betrayal.
I have learnt that the world will take everything from you if you let it, your softness, your fire, your identity, and then ask why you are empty. But the moment you decide to guard your peace, people will call it selfish. Let them. They do not know what it cost you to come back to yourself.
This time, I choose me, loudly, unapologetically, and without explanation.
Because I know what it feels like to disappear behind a smile.
I know what it costs to love everyone but yourself.
And I know that when you finally rebuild the woman you lost, you protect her differently.
So no, I cannot afford to lose me again.
Not when I fought through hell to find the parts I buried.
Not when I have turned my pain into poetry and my wounds into wisdom.
Not when I have learnt that peace is not the absence of chaos.. It is the presence of self.
