I am running with this theme still. Sorry.
I have been lost a lot in life. Like so many times. So very many, many times. But each time, the reason that I stayed lost for as long as I did was because I couldn’t admit to myself that I was actually lost.
I called it other things:
Right.
Happy.
Ok.
Pretty much anything else other than lost.
And that enabled me to remain lost for a long time. I mean, like decades.
But I have come to realize that the prerequisite to being found is admitting you are lost in the first place...
And what I see now that I never saw before, is that sometimes I want to stay lost. I do not want to be found, most especially by myself, but others also. So getting lost and denying that I am lost, is a way to stay unfound. Ok, that is a bit twisted. But it makes sense to me.
In order to be found, one must be willing to admit, to at least yourself, that you are lost. And that is not an easy admission sometimes. And I would think that after all my lostness, I would be an expert at owning that by now. But I am not. I still find myself covering, explaining and doing a lot of things to hide that I am in fact lost.
If only to myself.
What is there about being lost that is so hard to accept?
For me, I think it is that I don’t know something, like what I am doing. How can I admit to all around me that I am winging it? I have no idea what or why I am here, doing this whatever thing I am doing.
The older I get, the more I am ok with owning this idea that I frequently am the last to know what the fuck I am doing. And why I am doing it is an even harder thing to know!
I guess where I land today is that I like getting lost and I like the feeling of finding myself again. Like I tuck little parts away from me, then go in search of them. It is like a game of hide and seek that I play with myself. Where is that part of Erin? Over here? Nope. Over there? Let’s go see.
And I can do it for decades...go in search of parts of me that I didn’t know were missing until I find them. Hidden in plain sight, sight lines that others see clearly but for me, are hard to view, and even harder to see. I stumble over them mostly.
There is a lot to being lost and found it turns out.
And I am in the thick of it again. Lost and working towards the found. But I am taking my time. No mad rush to the rescue portion of the lost. I am quite content wandering around in the woods by myself right now, feeling ok with the lost and being ok knowing that the rescue point, the pull out point can and might be missed, and still continuing to be lost anyway. Fuck it. I guess I would rather die lost, than to be found too soon. If only by myself. Like there are parts of me, that even for me, need time to percolate. Like too much Erin revealed too soon is just too much to take. Even for Erin.
I won’t even get into how it is for others...
But when the time is right, being found is amazing. That place where you meet yourself where you actually are, and can see it and accept it and not run. Those are moments sublime and change everything in a moment. I am no longer the same. In the moment of finding, I am reborn, born anew if only to myself.
And that is what keeps me searching. Those moments where I am happy and found and see myself for who and what and how I am. So good. So fucking good. To meet yourself where you are and allow the delusion slip away.
Lost is good but finding yourself in all your lost is it own reward. Worth all the aimless wandering and seemingly endless loops and detours that feel like they have led you to just more nothingness.
But in an instant, and it always happens for me like this, I am changed. I see the lost, and then I see the found. And then I move on with myself, this newly revealed portion of me that has been waiting for acknowledgement in the shadowy parts of my soul. One day we both dare to admit, dare to see this part and then once revealed, welcome it into my heart and life. And out into the sunshiney world we wander. To get more lost and found, I guess.
Being lost is a prerequisite to being found. And I am learning, quite slowly, that I seem to need a lot of prerequisites...and that is totally ok.
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