How I found myself again

A few years ago, I found myself sitting in a small guest room, staring into a mirror and wondering where I had gone. I don’t mean physically. I knew exactly where I was. What I couldn’t find was the woman I used to be.

The breakup had hit me harder than I wanted to admit. Then the pandemic arrived, and suddenly the world became very small. Looking back now, I can see that I wasn’t really living during that time. I was surviving.

For a while, I became surprisingly good at pretending everything was okay. I told myself I was managing. I told other people I was fine. I convinced myself that if I could just get through one more day, one more week, one more month, things would eventually get better. But underneath all of that, I was struggling more than I allowed myself to acknowledge.
I fell into a deep depression. I started binge eating, my skin broke out constantly, and my confidence disappeared. I lost money, lost my apartment, and didn’t get accepted into the studies I had worked so hard for. It felt as if every area of my life was unraveling at the same time.
A friend offered me her guest room, and for that I will always be grateful. But I remember sitting there some days feeling completely disconnected from my own life. The future I had imagined for myself no longer existed, and I had no idea what was supposed to come next.
At the time, I thought the breakup was the hardest part. Looking back, I think the hardest part was losing myself.

Everything that once brought me joy had disappeared. Dance events, travelling, meeting friends, spontaneous adventures, making plans for the future – all the things that made me feel alive suddenly felt very far away.
The world had gone quiet, and all I was left with was myself. The problem was that I didn’t want to be alone with myself. So I distracted myself. Food became comfort. Social media became escape. Busywork became a way of filling the hours without actually feeling anything. Anything seemed easier than sitting with the emotions I had spent months trying to avoid.

Deep down, I knew there was a voice inside me asking for attention. It kept whispering that something needed to change. But I wasn’t ready to listen.
I had no energy left. No motivation. No vision for the future. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself over the years, it’s that I can be incredibly stubborn. So I stayed in that place longer than I probably needed to.

Then something unexpected happened. The world slowly started opening up again. Restaurants reopened. Cafés filled up. People started making plans. Dance events returned. Life began moving forward. For months, I had been waiting for that moment. I thought I would feel excited when it finally arrived. Instead, I felt afraid.
I remember seeing events advertised that I would have loved attending before and realizing I had no desire to go. The thought of walking into a room full of people made me anxious. I didn’t fit into my usual clothes anymore. My confidence was gone. My body felt unfamiliar. Even looking at myself in the mirror felt uncomfortable.

For the first time in my life, I wanted to hide. That realization was painful because I knew it wasn’t me. I’ve always been someone who loves being around people. I recharge through connection, laughter, dancing, and shared experiences. Yet there I was, avoiding the very things that had always brought me joy. And that was the moment something shifted. I realized I had spent months waiting for life to come back. What I actually needed was to come back to myself.
There was no dramatic breakthrough. No magical morning where I woke up feeling motivated. There was simply a quiet decision that I couldn’t keep living the way I was living. I couldn’t keep waiting for confidence to return on its own. I couldn’t keep hoping that changing circumstances would suddenly make me feel better. I had to start showing up for myself again.
Not perfectly. Not all at once. Just one small step at a time.

I started moving my body again. Some days that meant doing a workout. Other days it meant going for a walk or putting on music and dancing around my living room. The goal wasn’t to change how I looked. The goal was to reconnect with myself.
I also began paying attention to the small things I had stopped doing. I booked appointments I had been avoiding. I started taking care of my skin again. I went to the hairdresser. I returned to little routines that used to make me feel good. At first, those things seemed almost insignificant. They certainly didn’t solve all my problems. But they did something important. They reminded me that I mattered. Every small act of self-care was a promise to myself that I was worth looking after.
One habit became especially important during that time. Every time I walked past a mirror, I made myself stop for a moment. Instead of immediately criticizing what I saw, I tried to find something kind to say. Some days it felt natural. Some days it felt completely ridiculous. But I kept doing it anyway.

Because rebuilding confidence isn’t about waking up one morning and suddenly loving yourself. It’s about learning to stop treating yourself like the enemy.
Slowly, things began to change. Not overnight, and certainly not perfectly. But little by little, I started feeling more like myself again. My energy returned. My confidence returned. My spark returned. Most importantly, my relationship with myself began to heal.

Looking back now, one of the biggest lessons that experience taught me is that we don’t lose ourselves just once in life. We lose ourselves after heartbreak. After becoming mothers. After illness. After burnout. After major life transitions. After years of putting everyone else’s needs ahead of our own. Sometimes we lose ourselves because life knocks us down. Sometimes we lose ourselves because we’ve been surviving for so long that we’ve forgotten how to truly live. And every time it happens, we tend to believe something has gone wrong.

But what if it hasn’t? What if getting lost is part of being human? What if life isn’t about finding yourself once and holding onto that version forever? What if it’s about meeting yourself again and again throughout different seasons of your life?

The woman I am today is not the same woman I was before that breakup. And she’s certainly not the same woman who sat in that guest room feeling hopeless and disconnected. But I don’t wish I could go back. Because every time I found myself again, I came back with more self-awareness, more self-trust, and more compassion than before. I came back knowing myself more deeply.
And to me, that’s what finding yourself really means.

It’s not a destination. It’s not a finish line. It’s a relationship.
A relationship you nurture, lose, rediscover, and strengthen throughout your life.
So if you’re in a season where you feel lost, disconnected, or unsure of who you are right now, I want you to know this:

Nothing is wrong with you. You are not behind. You are not failing. You are simply in a chapter that is asking you to reconnect with yourself. And even if you can’t see her right now, the woman you’re searching for is still there.

She’s beneath the fear, beneath the self-doubt, and beneath the pain.
She’s waiting patiently for you to come back to her.

With love,
Johanna