“I Miss the Person I Was Before Everything Fell Apart”
“I’ve changed so much, and not in a way I recognize. I used to feel more alive, more open, more sure of myself. Now I feel tired all the time, cynical, guarded. People say I seem strong, but I don’t feel strong. I just feel like I’m surviving. I miss who I was before it all went wrong—even if I know I can’t go back.”
Dear Lena,
That sentence alone carries so much weight. “I miss the person I was.” It’s a kind of grief that rarely gets acknowledged—the loss of a self that once felt whole, or at least more vibrant, more certain, more intact. When life collapses around us, we brace for the external losses: the relationship, the job, the identity, the structure. But what’s often more devastating is the quiet disappearance of who we were inside it.
The person who used to laugh more easily. Trust more quickly. Try more freely. The person who hadn’t yet been disappointed in these particular ways.
And while others may see your current self and think “resilient,” they don’t see what you’ve had to let go of in order to function. They don’t feel the daily negotiations you make with your own hope. They don’t notice the gap between the surface and the depth—between “doing okay” and feeling like a stranger to yourself.
There’s something nobody tells you about surviving: sometimes it doesn’t feel like strength. It feels like flattening. Like trading the full color of your emotional life for grayscale just to make it through. And then one day, you realize you haven’t heard yourself laugh in months, and you don’t know whether you’re just tired—or something in you quietly gave up.
Missing who you were isn’t weak. It’s human. It means you remember being more than just this moment of coping. It means your aliveness still lives somewhere inside you—even if it’s buried beneath layers of adaptation and defense.
But here’s the thing. You’re not just grieving a past version of yourself. You’re also holding space for who you might still become. And that’s the hardest part of this middle space—you’re carrying a memory and a maybe, both at once. The memory of who you were, and the maybe of who you could be. And in between, there’s fatigue. Flatness. A kind of emotional jet lag that doesn’t resolve on schedule.
You may not be able to become that person again. Life doesn’t always let us go backward. But that doesn’t mean the warmth, the clarity, the ease you once knew is gone forever. It may return differently—less naive, maybe, but more rooted. It may come through in smaller moments, steadier ones. It may not look like your old self, but it might feel like wholeness in a new shape.
You don’t have to force it. You don’t have to fix it. Just be honest with yourself about the ache. The ache is a sign you’re still alive to what matters.
I’m walking that road too.
–RJ