Dear mind, I mind.

The sense of having lost my identity is what troubled me the most during my depression. It happened after I lost my mother.  The internal conflicts about who I am and the questions I’d ask to find my identity only made it worse.  What I should be doing, what I should focus on, and what I should prioritize were some of the easy questions. The difficult ones were always about my personality. When you are going through something, you feel you need support and, in a way, you feel entitled to it because of what life is putting you through, or at least that’s how I felt. I needed support, love, constant presence of the people I loved and didn’t realize or really care that they had other stuff in their lives too. My identity had become about being something to someone and without them I felt like I was nothing. I was a friend, I was a daughter, I was a sister, but who was I if I wasn’t any of these? I didn’t know.

I was disinterested in everything I used to love before. I didn’t find anything that could make me feel excited. My existence was just about meeting the people I loved because that made me happy and feel optimistic. The moment I was alone that happiness would vanish. And even when I used to be with people, I felt I was being a burden, I didn’t really matter to them, if I’m gone one day, they wouldn’t even feel my absence because I meant nothing. I mean, I’m talking about the people that actually loved me but even with them, I felt insignificant. I felt non-existent. My entire identity had become about what I meant to these people and I was a nobody otherwise. So, whenever they would prioritize something else over me, I mean, I knew they had to, but I couldn’t tolerate it because that used to make me feel like a nobody. I would pick fights, say mean things, not intentionally, impulsively, just to get their attention, love and reassurance that I mattered. As messed up as it is, the inner child in me knew just one method to get attention- throw a tantrum.

It took me a long time, a few therapy sessions, a few fights and long hours of introspection to realize that I needed to find myself again. That was the only way to end the vicious cycle. And I knew it wouldn’t be a piece of cake. Finding myself meant coming to terms with a few bitter truths about myself, accepting my flaws, and rectifying my mistakes. Many a time we fall into this dreamy illusion that finding ourselves means going out on a date with ourself, exploring new things, travelling, going on adventures, learning something new and finding joy in it, etc, etc. But in reality, it is only a small part of the ugly process. The process is ugly, but the result is a beautiful thing. You’ll spend many nights going over the same things in your mind, thinking how you could have avoided making that mistake, what made you make the mistake in the first place, what was the driving feeling, what gave birth to that feeling, how you put that across, how better could you have expressed, why you expressed the way you did, oh, I can keep on going. But this is the first step to finding ourselves. I needed to have a lot of uncomfortable conversations with myself, get to the bottom of it, and take corrective measures.

The one thing I realized was that the answer to most of my questions was, “my inner child made me do it”. Only when we look further and further down do we realize that we are the products of our childhood environment, for a child is like a sponge that can only absorb and not let go. Everything that was said, every comment made, every praise would have had an impact greater than we think. That child remembers every feeling and whatever made it to feel that way. If the child was praised for getting good marks and that made it happy, it would try hard to keep scoring well to get that praise. If a child threw a tantrum and got attention, the next time it needed the attention and wasn’t getting it, it’d throw a tantrum. When that inner child’s needs are not being met in the adult, the child reminds the adult of ways to meet the needs though the situations and people are entirely different now. I started to find myself once I started realizing the needs of the inner child in me. Once we get in touch with our inner child and ask it what it needs, or what it needs to heal from, we can voluntarily control how it gets it. When we are on autopilot, the inner child takes control of how the needs get met. That’s mostly when people have called me immature (well, you can’t expect a child to be mature).  When we realize that the means by which we have been getting what we want is wrong and has been hurting people, that’s when we question our identity and find an answer. The adult you wouldn’t want to hurt your loved ones but the child doesn’t care. It wants what it wants. So accepting that the end doesn’t justify the means and it was wrong though the intention behind it was to feel loved, it is very hard. It happens in stages. First comes denial the devil (I am not a bad person and I didn’t mean to hurt anyone so I’m not the one at fault for how they took it), next comes guilt the ghost (sleepless nights because I can’t forgive myself for hurting the people I love the most) , finally the angel of acceptance.

The process of finding yourself isn’t just limited to healing your inner child. It also involves the making of the adult. Which is not as hard, because while healing your inner child, you will start painting the picture of what or who you want to be. All it needs is just some detailing now. This is where you do all the fantasy stuff. Start exploring new interests, go back to what you used to love before, and see if that’s still something you want to do, meet new people, travel, hustle, etc (I hope you got the idea).

The last part is detaching your identity from other people. I and my inner child, both our identities were linked to my mom. Once she wasn’t around anymore, I wasn’t either. If your sense of self isn’t concrete, you often link it with someone else. Knowing that person is a part of your life and not a part of you is the real deal. It is definitely easier said than done, but becoming emotionally independent is finding yourself. Don’t give the remote of your emotions to someone else and make them a part of you and dictate your mood.

Also, we all at some point, have felt the need for another person to make us whole. But we are complete as we are.  That’s just romanticizing something the wrong way. We are complete, we are whole for we love, we care and we support in whatever way we can at that particular point in time. We always do. So, if you feel you need someone else to complete you, that’s your cue to detach your identity from that person.