The journey back to myself

I remember standing in front of my wardrobe one morning, staring at clothes I no longer felt comfortable wearing.

The dresses I once loved stayed on their hangers. The outfits that used to make me feel confident suddenly felt like they belonged to someone else. In the end, I reached for the same oversized grey jumper I had been hiding in for months.It had become my armour.

As I looked in the mirror, I barely recognized the woman staring back at me. At the time, I thought the problem was my weight.
After a painful breakup, I had fallen into a deep depression and gained around 20 kilos. I felt exhausted, disconnected, and lost. I stopped making plans. I withdrew from people. Even simple things felt overwhelming.

Looking back now, I can see that it wasn’t really about the weight. The weight was simply what I could see. What I couldn’t see was how deeply disconnected I had become from myself. My body wasn’t the problem. It was carrying the pain I hadn’t yet learned how to process. Heartbreak has a way of changing more than your relationship status. Sometimes it changes your relationship with yourself.
When we’re carrying emotional pain, grief, stress, or disappointment, we often shift into survival mode. We focus on getting through the day. We keep functioning, keep showing up, and keep carrying on because life doesn’t stop.
But somewhere in the process, we stop listening. To our emotions. To our needs. To ourselves.

I think many women know exactly what this feels like.
You can be doing everything you’re supposed to do: going to work, taking care of your family, supporting everyone around you and still feel like something is missing. You might not even be able to explain it. You just know that somewhere along the way, you’ve lost touch with yourself.

That was exactly how I felt.
For a long time, I believed my confidence would return once my body changed. I thought that if I lost the weight and looked more like my old self, everything would somehow fall back into place. But the more I reflected on my journey, the more I realized that confidence wasn’t what I had lost. What I had really lost was my connection to myself. I had spent so much time ignoring my own needs that I no longer knew how to hear them. I pushed through exhaustion. I dismissed my emotions. I focused on what everyone else needed while quietly abandoning myself.
Over the years, I’ve come to see that many women experience the same thing. They think they have a confidence problem, but underneath that is often something deeper. They’ve become disconnected from who they are.
And when that happens, it’s no surprise that we wake up one day feeling like strangers in our own lives.

My turning point came unexpectedly. One day, I signed up for a chakra healing session. If I’m honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting myself into. I just knew I couldn’t keep feeling the way I was feeling. That experience didn’t magically heal me. But it opened a door. For the first time in a long time, I felt connected to my body again. I became aware of emotions I had buried beneath years of pain and survival mode. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was powerful. Something inside me softened, and for the first time in a long while, I felt curious about myself again.
That curiosity became the beginning of my healing journey. Instead of trying to fix myself, I started learning how to listen to myself. I began moving more. I started dancing again. I paid attention to how I felt instead of constantly focusing on how I looked.

I still remember one evening when I put on music in my living room and started moving, almost hesitantly. The curtains were closed, nobody could see me, and honestly, I felt awkward. After months of feeling disconnected from my body, even moving freely felt unfamiliar. But something unexpected happened. For a few minutes, I stopped thinking about my weight. I stopped thinking about the breakup. I stopped thinking about everything that was wrong. I was simply present.
When the music stopped, I stood there feeling emotional, though I couldn’t fully explain why. Nothing in my life had changed. The heartbreak was still there. The challenges were still there. But for the first time in a long while, I felt connected to myself.

Looking back now, I think that was one of the first moments I truly started coming home. As the weeks and months passed, I continued building a different relationship with my body. For years, I had treated it like a project that needed improvement. I judged it, criticized it, and focused on everything I wanted to change. Healing invited me into a completely different conversation – one rooted in compassion rather than criticism. The more I listened to my body, the more I realized how much wisdom it had been holding all along. As I reconnected with myself, something unexpected happened. I started feeling alive again. I felt more present in my daily life. I felt more comfortable expressing myself and taking up space. I felt more connected to my emotions, my intuition, and my own voice.
This is what feminine energy has come to mean for me. Not a certain look. Not a certain body type. Not a version of femininity defined by social media.
To me, feminine energy is the experience of feeling connected to your body, your emotions, your intuition, and your authentic self. When we’re disconnected from ourselves, we often feel guarded, numb, and exhausted. When we begin reconnecting, we create space for softness, creativity, confidence, and self-expression to return naturally.

One of the biggest lessons this journey has taught me is that healing isn’t about becoming someone new. So many of us believe we need to become a better version of ourselves before we can feel confident, worthy, or fulfilled. We think we need to be more successful, more attractive, more healed, or more accomplished. But healing doesn’t ask us to become someone else. It asks us to come home to ourselves. To reconnect with the woman beneath the heartbreak, beneath the self-doubt, beneath the expectations and responsibilities that caused her to lose touch with who she is. The confident version of you isn’t someone you need to create.
She’s already there. She may be buried beneath years of people-pleasing, self-criticism, heartbreak, or emotional pain, but she’s still there. And every small act of self-connection helps you find your way back to her.

If you’ve been feeling disconnected from yourself lately, I want to encourage you to start gently. You don’t need to change your entire life overnight. Sometimes healing begins with something as simple as putting on your favourite song and moving your body for a few minutes. Sometimes it starts by placing a hand on your heart and asking yourself a simple question:
“What do I need today?”
Not what everyone else needs.
Not what you think you should need.
What do you need?

You don’t need all the answers right now. You don’t need to have everything figured out. You simply need to take one small step toward yourself. Because the relationship you’ve been searching for may not be outside of you at all. It may be waiting within you.

For years, I thought I needed to become a different woman – more confident, more attractive, more healed, more something. But healing didn’t ask me to become someone new. It asked me to come back to the woman who was already there. The woman beneath the heartbreak. The woman beneath the self-doubt. The woman beneath all the ways she had learned to abandon herself.

And maybe the woman you’re searching for isn’t someone you need to become either. Maybe she’s already there too.
Waiting patiently beneath the expectations, the fear, and the stories you’ve learned to believe about yourself. Waiting for you to come home.

With love,
Johanna