TO BE LOST

What happens when the person who has always been praised for knowing the right path discovers that the path itself was never hers?

When I was 13, in high school, I was part of the Presidential Award Club.

I don’t know if that still exists today, but it was this super cool extracurricular that involved hiking and climbing and generally making teenagers do things that would probably get a school sued today.

Our final excursion was a five-day trip to the Aberdare Ranges.

Five days of waking up before the sun had reported for duty, reluctantly crawling out of our warm sleeping bags and into the freezing morning air, and heading into the mist for another day of trying to survive.

Speaking of which, Brian, if you are reading this, gimme back my beloved sleeping bag. You little thief!

I had an amazing sleeping bag.

Perfect thickness. Perfect snuggle. Brilliant quality. A dream to sleep in and a nightmare to fold up every morning because it would put up a fight, refusing to be caged for the next 12 hours.

I understood it (the sleeping bag) on a deeply personal level.

Anyway, I digress.

We’d take some kind of hot beverage and off we’d go, with our lifesaving tools: a compass, a map, a dwindling supply of nourishment, and the vague confidence of thirteen-year-olds who had been told they were capable of this.

We’d split into smaller groups and begin making our way to that evening’s checkpoints, using the map and compass to lead us there.

Imagine no Google Maps, kids.

Just following the sun.

Ridiculous.

I freaking loved it.

I was good at it too. Weighing way above everyone else, yet my stamina was undefeated. I was always at the front of the pack.

For all five days, my group never got lost. We always somehow found the right path and made it back to base camp as expected.

A bit boring, now that I think about it.

Maybe, somewhere in my thirteen-year-old brain, I thought this experience was symbolic of what my life would be.

There was a map.

There was a compass.

There were checkpoints.

There was a path.

Follow the instructions. Keep your eyes on the compass. Get to the checkpoint. Eventually, you get home.

Simple.

Except life doesn’t work that way, does it, folks?

While I never did get lost in the Aberdares, it was later, when I had a map, a compass, checkpoints, and a very clear set of instructions for how to live, that I lost myself.

See, the thing is, by nature, I am not a rule follower.

I am obstinate. Rebellious. I don’t do things simply because “that’s how it’s done.”

Just that as a reason gets me going in the opposite direction.

I do things that make sense to me.

Because f*** the rules.

Especially the ones that make no sense.

And 97% of the time, that’s all of them.

Who’s making these darned rules anyway?

But I grew up in a very Christian household. One that slowly sculpted me into a version of myself I had never chosen.

While I was rebellious in many ways, unable to submit to authority figures, allergic to being told what to do – generally a delightful child – I did recognize one Authority.

God.

That was my Achilles heel.

I can feel some of you about to panic. Hear me out.

I believe spirituality is central to human life & meaning. What I don’t believe is that anything should require you to turn off your brain, or yourself, in order to make sense of it.

This, however is not how I was living.

For me, if it came from God, or from “people of God”, I stopped questioning or reasoning.

I closed my ears.

I closed my eyes.

I shut down my brain, my heart, my instincts – all of it.

I did as I was told.

And that right there is where my compass started acting funny.

Not broken.

Just…suspiciously committed to pointing in one direction.

I had spent my whole life questioning everybody else’s directions. But when the instruction came wrapped in God, I defaulted to, Oh. Well. In that case.

And that was the beginning of my detour.

Not because I stopped following the map.

But because I followed it too well.

This is not an article about faith. Stay with me.

Matthew 5:30 says, “If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away.”

So I did.

Okay, not literally.

But spiritually? Emotionally?

Oh, I was carrying a machete.

I cut everything off.

No negotiation. No balance. Nothing was getting between me and God’s kingdom.

If it dreamed of pausing a threat to my standing, it had to go.

So I let go of everything.

My dreams.

My goals.

My personality.

My desires.

My friendships.

My lovers.

Parts of myself I didn’t even realize I was giving away.

I was doing all the right things.

The kind of right things that Christian audiences of faith would applaud.

I was the good example.

I was the kid parents would point to and tell their children:

Why can’t you be like this idiot? (My version of what they should’ve been saying, obviously).

I became very good at being good.

Which makes sense because I’ve been told I have some kind of Midas touch. I’m good at many things.

And here, apparently, I was outshining myself.

But, as Newton would have it, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

So I became exceptionally bad at being me.

Enter: self-abandonment.

And the strange thing about it?

You don’t notice it happening.

There is no dramatic moment where you wake up one morning and realize, Oh shoot, I’ve abandoned myself.

It happens quietly.

One decision at a time.

You say no to this thing because it isn’t right.

Then that thing.

Then that person.

Then that dream.

Then that part of your personality.

Until eventually you have become so good at saying no to yourself that you don’t even know what your yes sounds like anymore.

And I did it all believing I was doing the right thing.

But somewhere in the middle of doing everything right, I had built a life that felt increasingly wrong.

I wasn’t lost because I didn’t know where the path was.

I was lost because wanting a different path was itself a form of defiance.

And so I kept walking.

Further and further away from a life that was mine.

Further away from the person I actually was.

Until I became a shell of myself whose only identity was:

Do right.

At the expense of truly being alive.

See, there is a difference between surrendering something and abandoning yourself.

Between choosing something difficult because it is right for you and choosing against yourself because you’ve been convinced that your own desires and instincts are inherently suspect.

I didn’t know the difference.

So I did both.

And now, at 31, I find myself lost.

And ya’ll, being lost as an adult looks nothing like being lost in the woods.

There are no wrong turns. No obvious dead ends.

Sometimes, everything looks right and still feels wrong.

The pillars that make up your life start feeling like someone else assembled them while you were away.

The career – that you’re actually excelling at.

The lifestyle – that looks perfectly fine from the outside.

The friendships – some good, some great, some simply familiar.

The routines – that suck you dry but do their job..

The plans – five-year plans, ten-year plans (surely this is what a successful adult does– plans).

None of it looks bad.

It just doesn’t feel like it belongs to you.

Today, as I look up at the sun, I am surrounded by thicket.

The map I had spent years following doesn’t tell me where I want to go anymore.

The compass still works.

But I don’t know if I’m supposed to be walking north.

So I’ve picked up a jembe.

And I’m carving my way out from inside this wilderness.

Out of the life I built for a version of me that is now dead.

To find my way back home.

Back to the girl I abandoned a decade ago.

At 13, I thought getting home meant following the map.

At 31, I’m beginning to wonder if getting home means finally giving myself permission to make my own path.

Which is terrifying.

Because the map?

The checkpoints?

I get to define them now.

And frankly, I don’t even know where home is.

This story also lives on Substack. Read it there ↗

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