Have you been feeling disconnected from yourself lately? A little off, in a way you can’t quite point to?
Almost two years ago, I fell 50 feet off a cliff.
I’ve been recovering from it ever since, and somewhere in the last 23 months, without ever deciding to, I stopped being Christina and became the injured person instead.
A few days ago, my sister asked me the most ordinary question. “How are you?”
Without thinking, I answered from my injury. She stopped me gently and said. “No, I meant you. How are YOU?”
Something in me went very still.
That question is what finally showed me what had happened.
I had spent almost two years carrying something that was never meant to become all of me, until I couldn’t tell where the injury ended and I began.
Why You Feel Disconnected From Yourself Lately
I don’t think this is only about injury.
Some of us have become the divorce.
The diagnosis.
The heartbreak we never fully named.
The job loss, the failure, the role we grew into by default and never questioned.
Here is what I have come to believe.
That disconnected, unlike-myself feeling so many of us carry is often not about losing who we are.
It’s about carrying something that was never meant to be carried this long.
An event happened, and somewhere along the way we picked it up and never fully set it back down.
We took on what wasn’t ours to hold onto forever, and it quietly started living where we used to.
It rarely announces itself directly.
It shows up as,
I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.
I just feel off.
I feel like I’m going through the motions.
I don’t feel like myself anymore.
And most of us don’t call it what it is.
We call it a mood, a phase, tiredness, something to push through, when really it might be the weight of something we’ve been carrying quietly for far too long.
Psychologists sometimes talk about something called narrative identity, the ongoing story we build about who we are out of the events of our life.
It’s a helpful idea because it explains something so many of us feel and can’t quite name.
When one chapter takes up enough space for long enough, it can start to read like the whole book, and we end up feeling like strangers to ourselves.
Not because the rest of the story disappeared.
Because that one chapter got so loud, everything else went quiet.
That’s what had happened to me.
And if you’re honest with yourself, there may be a chapter doing the same thing in your life right now, quietly explaining why you feel unlike yourself.
Carrying What Isn’t Yours Isn’t a Weakness
I want to be really clear about something.
Carrying what isn’t yours for this long isn’t a character flaw and it isn’t a failure of willpower.
The part of us that’s built to keep us safe pays closer attention to pain and threat than almost anything else.
That’s not dysfunction, that’s design.
Our attention naturally narrows around whatever feels most urgent, and pain is very good at feeling urgent, sometimes for years after the event itself is over.
So if you’ve noticed that a hard season has quietly become the main character of your life, that isn’t proof that something is wrong with you.
It’s proof that you’re human, and that your system did exactly what it was built to do.
It just may be time to widen the lens back out on purpose.
This Happened to Me vs. This Is Me
Here is the distinction I keep coming back to, and it’s a simple one even though it doesn’t always feel simple to live.
This happened to me describes an event. It has a beginning. It may still be unfolding. It is real, and it deserves care and attention.
This is me describes an identity. It’s meant to hold everything, not just the hardest chapter.
When we quietly let the first sentence become the second one, we don’t just carry the pain.
We start living inside it, answering from it, making decisions from it, introducing ourselves through it, even when nobody asked us to.
That’s the moment feeling disconnected from yourself really sets in, when something that happened to you starts speaking for all of you.
The two sentences are not the same. And noticing the difference is where feeling like yourself again actually begins.
A Practice for Feeling Like Yourself Again
When I realized how long I’d been answering from the wound, I needed something simple I could actually use, not another concept to think about.
Here is the practice I’ve been leaning on.
1. Notice the lens.
The next time someone asks how you are, or you catch yourself narrating your day, pause and ask:
Am I answering from the wound, or from me? No judgment either way. Just notice.
2. Name the two things separately.
Out loud or on paper, finish these two sentences:
This happened to me… and This is still true about me… Naming them apart, even briefly, starts to loosen the fusion between the two.
3. Reach back for who you were before.
What did you love, value, or care about before this chapter started?
A hobby, a way of laughing, a pace you used to move at. You don’t have to force it back. Just let yourself remember it exists.
4. Choose one small act.
Pick one small thing today that the pre-chapter version of you would do, and do it, even briefly.
Not to prove anything.
Just to remind your nervous system that she’s still in there.
This isn’t a one-time fix.
Some days the wound will still answer first, and that’s alright.
The practice isn’t about getting it right every time.
It’s about coming back, again and again, to the truer sentence.
The whole story.
You Are Not the Hardest Thing You Have Been Through
If some chapter has quietly become the whole story lately, whether it’s an injury, a diagnosis, a heartbreak, or a role you grew into and never chose, I want you to hear this the way I needed to hear it.
What happened to you is real.
And it was never the whole of you.
You existed before it.
You are allowed to remember her, or him, on purpose.
Not by rushing the healing or performing okay-ness, and instead by letting the truer sentence back in, a little more each day.
You are not the hardest thing you have ever been through.
You are the whole story. Every heartbreak, every hurdle, every win. All of it.
Warmly,
Christina
