Not Learning Who You Are: When All Your Energy Goes To Survival

One of the hardest things about really going through it as a young person, is that you lose so much energy to just recovering that you don't get to learn who you really are.

When you’re struggling as a teen, you spend so much time just doing damage control — trying to regroup after a horrible week. Trying to just feel okay enough to get through the day. Defending yourself to your family, avoiding things, trying to clean things up, or numb out, or escape. All of your energy goes toward just trying to not feel pain. And you have nothing left to direct toward something generative, creative, exciting. Something you actually care about.

In my junior year of high school I was at a new high school — I went to five in all — and I made the mock trial team. Which was a big thing there. They'd won nationals many times, the team was tight-knit, everyone was invested and took it seriously. I was excited and grateful for the opportunity — to make friends, to have a team, to belong somewhere, and have something to work towards.

And I barely went.

I had an outpatient DBT program I was attending three days a week. Neurofeedback another day. A psychiatrist I was seeing to try to get my medications figured out. I was doing so many hours a week shuttling around all of these appointments trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with me. And other times, even when I didn't have appointments, I was so low mentally I just didn't go.

I can't be around people right now. I can't talk to anyone. I am so not okay, I don't know how to go be with a group of people. That happened just as often as the scheduling conflicts — I felt so worn down from life, so badly about myself, and couldn’t bring myself to go. I was using all the energy I had to cope — sleep, scroll, eat, cry.

And a horrible cycle began — one I see in young people's lives all the time.

I wanted to be "normal," attending social things and extracurriculars like other kids. I wanted to be participating and engaging with my life. But the reality was I felt off, not okay, deeply sad. Days would come where I couldn't get out of bed for any amount of money in the world — the hopelessness and exhaustion just took me out. Or, I’d feel so insecure I literally felt uncomfortale just being around other people. So I didn't go. But the less I went, the further I drifted from the community, the harder it became to re-engage.

And then a few months later I saw pictures on social media of the mock trial team — in pantsuits and business casual, at the state building, smiling and holding their trophies. I hadn’t gone to enough practices to be able to go with them in the end.

And then a few months later I saw pictures on social media of the mock trial team — in pantsuits and business casual, at the state building, smiling and holding their trophies. I hadn't gone to enough practices to be able to go with them in the end. I hadn't had anything in me to show up, learn, grow, connect. I was drowning, and just trying to breathe.

And I felt so disappointed. So sad. Because I could see the thing I had wanted to be a part of, and I wasn't there. I had wanted to be there. I had made the team. I knew I could have learned it, gotten up to speed — if I'd just had the energy and capacity. There is such a sadness in not being able to meet your own potential.

My attention wasn't on what do I want to create in my life, what do I want to pursue? It was just about not feeling pain. Or recovering. Trying to feel okay again after a crash.

I felt so jealous of my friends who seemed to be sailing along. They were talking about college and next steps and future plans, and I stopped wanting to hang out with them — because being around them just felt like being reminded of all my inadequacies. I wished I could just be happy for them, be inspired by their ambition, celebrate them. But it made me feel like such an outsider that I withdrew from those relationships completely.

Something I notice consistently in the young people I work with is that they are undeniably gifted. Often exceptionally so. They are bright, funny, talented, and imaginative — there is no "reason" why they should be in such a different spot from their peers, and yet they are. Because emotional pain can become one of the biggest drains and energy-sucks imaginable. We lose so much energy to just doing damage control and recovering that we don't have much left to actually pursue something.

And that's the grief I really want to name to you — the grief of not having anything left to learn who you are, to fill in the lines of your own self. To feel like all your life is is just trying to do damage control, and not about living and being a whole, complete, worthy human.

And the pattern that happens is that feeling — of feeling behind, less-than, out of place — just perpetuates and feeds the cycle. We see everyone else having a full life, and we feel down, want to escape, want to cope with these bad feelings. We get further and further away from who we really are, and who we can really be.

I had a distinct feeling of knowing myself as a child — I read, I wrote, I lectured anyone who would listen about the importance of recycling. As I got older and things got rough, I stopped knowing who I was anymore — what I stood for, what I cared about, what I was even aiming at. When we're in a dark place mentally, our life becomes about trying not to feel bad. And it's a very difficult cycle to break out of, because we're so far from ourselves, so mystified, so lost, we don't know how to get started. And the grief of all that we've lost feels so great we can't even engage with the process of looking at it.

It's so painful.

So I want to tell you this… you haven't lost your spark. It's being overshadowed — drowned out by how much you're feeling and going through — but it's never gone. We are never too far gone.

The girl who used to make up dances and stories, make everyone in a room laugh, fill notebooks with drawings, sing in the car — she's still in there. She's just spending all of her energy on something we can't always see, or know, or name.

There is a beautiful mechanism in nature called the homing instinct. (So beautiful and poignant, I named my website this!) Animals have an inborn ability to find their way home — even when they have traveled great distances, even when they are in unfamiliar terrain. I believe we carry that same inner guidance. No matter how lost we feel, we are never too far gone. We can always find our way back to ourselves.

You were never meant to spend your whole life just surviving. You are meant to find out who you are, and boldly, bravely, beautifully be her.