The Rediscovery Pt. 2
Learning to Hear Myself Again
In Pt. 1, I asked the question I’ve been avoiding for a long time:
Who am I without the noise?
And once I asked it out loud, I realized something uncomfortable…
I didn’t just lose myself.
I also truly believed I had to.
Not because I wanted to disappear—
but because everything around me told me that giving all of myself away was the price of being “good.”
A good employee.
A good mom.
A good wife.
A good woman.
The belief that broke me
For a long time, I believed my value lived in my usefulness.
That if I worked harder, sacrificed more, stayed quieter, carried heavier loads—
eventually it would all pay off.
I believed I owed my job everything I had.
Even when it drained me.
Even when it stripped me down.
Even when it demanded parts of me I never got back.
I believed burnout was weakness.
That rest was laziness.
That needing more meant I wasn’t grateful enough.
And I believed—deeply—that putting myself last wasn’t just expected…
it was noble.
So I did what so many women (and men) do.
I emptied myself willingly.
Repeatedly.
Convincingly.
Until one day there was nothing left to give—
and no version of myself I recognized in the mirror.
The kind of noise you don’t notice until it stops
When I say “noise,” I don’t just mean the chaos of motherhood or daily life.
I mean the internal pressure that never shuts off.
The constant calculating.
The mental load.
The expectations I didn’t choose but absorbed anyway.
The belief that I had to earn rest.
The guilt that showed up the moment I slowed down.
The fear that if I stopped performing, everything would fall apart.
Some seasons are loud on the outside.
But the hardest ones?
They’re loud on the inside.
Because silence is where the truth lives.
And the truth was this:
I wasn’t just tired.
I was erased.
Rediscovery isn’t a makeover. It’s a return.
For a long time, I thought rediscovery meant reinventing myself.
A glow-up.
A bold pivot.
A final form.
But rediscovery isn’t a makeover.
It’s a return.
Not to the woman I was before motherhood or marriage or burnout, because she doesn’t exist anymore.
Rediscovery is remembering who I’ve always been underneath the expectations.
The parts of me that were buried under responsibility.
The voice I learned to quiet to survive.
The wants I dismissed because they felt selfish.
The hardest part wasn’t figuring out who I am.
It was admitting how deeply I believed I wasn’t allowed to be her anymore.
The truth: I stopped trusting myself
Somewhere along the way, I stopped trusting my own voice.
When you spend years prioritizing everyone else, you forget how to tell the difference between:
what you actually want and what you’ve been trained to want
You start living from the outside in.
Making decisions that look right on paper but feel wrong in your body.
You ignore the inner nudges because they’re inconvenient.
You treat your own feelings like background noise.
And eventually…you stop asking yourself anything at all.
I didn’t start small — I was stopped
The truth is… I didn’t gently ease into rediscovery.
I was forced into it.
Losing my job wasn’t subtle.
It wasn’t quiet.
It wasn’t something I planned or eased myself into.It shook me.
It cracked the structure I’d been living inside — the one that told me my worth came from productivity, stability, and endurance. The one that convinced me I had to sacrifice myself to survive.
When that fell away, I felt not only suddenly free...
I felt exposed.
But what it gave me — for the first time in a long time — was time.
Time to sit in the discomfort.
Time to feel the grief.
Time to realize how tightly my identity had been tied to something that was actively destroying me.
And it was in that stillness — not by choice, but by force — that I began to notice the small things.
Not because my life became small… but because the noise finally quieted enough to hear them.
The small things felt like oxygen
I didn’t start by “rebuilding” my life.
I started by noticing what made me feel like I could breathe again.
A warm cup of coffee I didn’t rush through.
Music playing while I cooked — not for efficiency, but for comfort.
Writing without an agenda.
Creating something with my hands and remembering I’m still in here.
Those things didn’t fix everything.
But they reminded me that I exist outside of obligation.
That joy doesn’t have to be earned.
That rest doesn’t have to be justified.
That I’m allowed to feel human — not just useful.
And then I started asking myself one question
Once the pace slowed — once the urgency loosened its grip — I began asking myself something I hadn’t asked in years:
“What do I need today?”
Not what needs done.
Not what makes me valuable.
Not what proves I’m handling everything well.
Just… what do I need?
Sometimes the answer was physical.
Sometimes emotional.
Sometimes it was simply space.
And sometimes the answer was:
“I don’t know yet.”
But even that felt like progress.
Because for the first time, I was listening.
And once you hear yourself again… you can’t pretend you didn’t.
That’s the part I’m still sitting with.
Because rediscovering myself doesn’t just mean noticing what I need. It also means acknowledging how much I sacrificed in the name of survival.
How much of myself I willingly gave away believing it was required. How deeply I believed disappearing was the price of being worthy.
And once you see that clearly, there’s a choice waiting.
It’s quiet… it’s uncomfortable…
I’m faced with deciding whether I’m willing to keep doing that.
And for the first time in a long time… maybe even ever…
I’m not sure I am.
I don’t have answers yet.
I don’t have a plan.
But I have awareness. And I have honesty.
And right now, that feels like enough.
Because maybe rediscovery doesn’t begin with becoming someone new.
Maybe it begins right here —
with a woman finally willing to question the beliefs that taught her to disappear.
Reflection question:
What did you believe you had to sacrifice to be worthy?
You don’t have to answer out loud.
Just noticing the belief is a beginning.