When You No Longer Feel Like You

Sometimes nothing is obviously wrong. And somehow, nothing feels quite right.

There were periods of my life when I couldn't have told you what was wrong.

Nothing was necessarily falling apart. I had relationships. I had clothes I liked. I had a car.

I worked. I lived my life.

And still, somewhere underneath all of it, I was waiting.

Waiting to make more money. Waiting for the better job. Waiting for the relationship to feel different. Waiting for life to become something more than what it was.

I didn't think of myself as disconnected from my identity. I didn't have that language then.

I just thought I wasn't happy yet.

And yet is a very interesting place to live.

The Life We're Taught to Want

Most of us are handed some version of the same blueprint.

Find love. Build a career. Make enough money. Get the house. Get the car. Create a family. Look a certain way. Become successful.

None of those things are inherently wrong. Many of them are beautiful things to experience.

The problem begins when we unconsciously make them requirements for how we're allowed to feel.

I'll feel secure when...

I'll feel successful when...

I'll finally be happy when...

Without realizing it, we can spend years outsourcing our sense of wholeness to circumstances that are always capable of changing.

I know I did.

And sometimes I actually had the things I thought I needed.

That's what made the disconnection so difficult to recognize.

A relationship, for example, can contain genuine love and companionship while simultaneously asking you to compromise parts of yourself. You appreciate what you're receiving, so you don't immediately recognize the cumulative cost of everything you're giving away.

The same can happen with a career. An environment. A lifestyle.

Even a version of yourself.

Nothing has to be terrible for it to no longer fit.

Sometimes you simply notice that you're participating in a life you recognize, but you don't completely recognize yourself inside of it.

When Everything Changed—and Nothing Changed

In 2017, I built a business during a period when I was deeply immersed in meditation and exploring consciousness.

I was fascinated by the relationship between our internal state and what we create externally, and I was essentially experimenting with it in my own life.

The business took off almost immediately.

Within the first week, I was making more than I made at my full-time job. Orders came consistently without advertising. It was one of those periods of my life that felt almost impossible to explain while I was living it.

Then came 2020.

Within a relatively short period of time, I lost my job, COVID disrupted the supply chain my business depended on, and I lost a significant amount of money through an investment with someone I trusted.

The life I had built changed dramatically.

And for the next couple of years, so did I.

By 2022, I was beginning again. I had returned to a full-time job only months earlier. I was living in the same home. Driving the same car. I hadn't suddenly rebuilt everything I'd lost.

But I had begun experimenting again.

This time, one of the things I became curious about was frequency.

I started experimenting with what were described as scalar frequencies, playing them through my phone. I had studied consciousness for years by then, so concepts involving energy weren't particularly foreign to me.

What was different was that, for the first time, I experienced a significant shift in my own frequency.

I could feel it, literally.

I felt clearer.

Lighter.

Less dense.

I can't tell you scientifically what was happening, and I'm careful not to turn my personal experience into a prescription for someone else's. I can only tell you that the contrast was significant enough that I noticed it.

So I became curious.

I kept experimenting.

I played them more consistently. I incorporated elixirs and some of the other spiritual practices I was exploring at the time. And rather than simply believing any of it worked, I watched myself.

How did I feel?

What was changing?

What was I noticing?

I began noticing changes in my environment.

Relationships and interactions that had felt discordant seemed to fall away or create more distance. At work, circumstances sometimes shifted in ways that physically moved me away from people or situations that hadn't felt good to me.

But it wasn't only about what seemed to be leaving.

Things were arriving, too.

My finances began improving. Opportunities and circumstances seemed to meet me at exactly the right moment. I experienced an unusual number of synchronicities—small situations that individually might have been easy to dismiss, but collectively became difficult for me to ignore.

I felt unusually clear and aware. Even my memory seemed sharper. Things I had struggled to recall began coming back to me with an ease I hadn't experienced in a long time.

There was a sense that life was somehow moving with me rather than something I was constantly trying to move through.

Other people noticed it, too.

Things seemed to work out for me so consistently during that period that people around me began commenting on it. From where I stood, some of those experiences felt almost miraculous.

I interpreted what was happening through the consciousness framework I was studying at the time. Someone else might interpret the same events differently—as coincidence, changes in perception and behavior, or something else entirely.

Whatever was happening, the change I was experiencing within myself was undeniable to me.

I was experiencing myself differently, and my experience of life seemed to be changing with me.

Over the course of roughly three months, what began as experimentation became one of the most profound shifts I had ever experienced in myself.

And the strange part was that the things I once believed needed to change in order for me to feel different hadn't.

There was no new relationship. No enormous check. No new home. No completely different life waiting for me on the other side.

And yet, I felt completely different inside the life I already had.

The closest description I have is that it felt as though my soul had finally entered my body.

I felt present.

Whole.

There was a sense of well-being that wasn't waiting for my circumstances to give it permission to exist.

To this day, I can't reduce what happened during that period to one frequency, one practice, one product or one explanation. I don't think I need to.

What mattered was that I experienced enough of a shift to realize something I hadn't fully understood before:

My internal state could change before my circumstances did.

But I began to understand something else, too.

The change I had been waiting to see in my life had to begin within me.

And once I experienced that—not as an idea, but as myself—I couldn't unknow it.

Maybe Nothing Is Missing

For much of my life, when I felt lack, I assumed lack meant something was missing.

So I looked outward.

What needs to change?

What do I need to accomplish?

What do I need to have?

Who do I need beside me?

But what if the feeling that something is missing isn't always an instruction to go find something?

What if sometimes it's an invitation to return to yourself?

That doesn't mean we stop wanting things. I still have desires. I still have goals. I still want beautiful experiences.

The difference is that I no longer want them to be responsible for making me whole.

Because when happiness is continually waiting on the next circumstance, there will almost always be another when.

When I have more money.

When I meet someone.

When my body changes.

When I get the promotion.

When I finally become the person I want to be.

At some point, I began choosing how I wanted to feel before I had evidence that I was supposed to feel that way.

And the more I did that, the more coherent my life began to feel.

Not perfect.

Coherent.

There is a difference.

And Then My Clothes Changed

Interestingly, I didn't gain clarity about my style by trying harder to figure out my style.

I gained clarity about my clothes as I gained clarity about myself.

That's an important distinction.

I didn't wake up one morning and decide to manufacture a new identity through fashion. As my relationship with myself changed, I became increasingly aware of what felt natural to me and what didn't.

My external expression began catching up with my internal one.

Today, people compliment what I'm wearing almost every day.

And here's the funny part: much of what I wear isn't expensive.

I don't rely on designer labels. Some of my favorite pieces come from very accessible places.

Because I've come to believe that what people are responding to isn't simply the garment.

They're experiencing the relationship between the garment and the person wearing it.

The clothes make sense on me because, increasingly, I make sense to me.

That's what I mean by coherence.

Style can communicate something before we ever speak. But the most compelling style I've encountered isn't compelling because someone followed every rule correctly or bought the right things.

It's compelling because something about the person and the expression feels connected.

You believe them.

Identity Before Alignment

This is why identity is where I believe the conversation begins.

Before asking what your style should look like, there may be a more interesting question:

Who is the person getting dressed?

Not her job title.

Not her relationship status.

Not what she owns.

Not what she has accomplished.

Not the version of herself she's learned to perform successfully.

Her.

And maybe you don't completely know the answer yet.

That's okay.

Sometimes realizing that you no longer feel like yourself isn't a crisis of identity.

Sometimes it's the beginning of one.

It may be the first moment you're conscious enough to recognize the distance between the life you've learned to live and the person you're becoming.

You don't necessarily need to immediately replace your wardrobe, leave your relationship, quit your job or reinvent your entire life.

You can start somewhere much quieter.

Notice.

Notice what feels like you.

Notice what doesn't.

Notice where you're choosing from desire and where you're choosing from obligation.

Notice what you're waiting for.

And perhaps most importantly, notice every place you've decided that something outside of you must change before you're allowed to feel whole.

Because maybe the version of you you've been waiting for isn't somewhere ahead of you.

Maybe she's already here.

And maybe, for the first time, you're finally beginning to recognize her.