Lost

Thinking back on things that scared me as a child, one of the first things I think about is my fear of being lost.

I remember having reoccurring nightmares where I would find myself lost out in the woods, completely alone. It was almost always a very large and very dark forest and an overwhelming feeling of sheer terror.

Frantically, I would be looking all around and quickly realizing that no one was with me. The gut-wrenching fear that no one was coming for me. This full-body panic would swoop over me and felt so real I would sometimes wake up in a sweat. I would often sit straight up in bed waking up confused and afraid. Little did my parents ever know how many times I would creep over to their room so I could peep in and be sure they were still there. Albeit their snoring was usually a dead giveaway that I was not alone, I tend to be a see-for-myself kind of gal.

What I didn’t know at the time is that these dreams and fears were a bit of foreshadowing to a theme in my life of always feeling a bit lost.

I have never have a sense of direction and that has haunted and followed me through life and just became part of who I am. I will say that I couldn’t stand it when my family, especially my extended family, would use me as some punch line in a joke about being bad at directions. They would tell the same stories of all the times I got lost driving and had to get my dad to talk me through it on the phone (even though I had a Garmin at the time.) There is only so many times you can laugh with them before wanting to throat punch someone. I still to this day do not understand why they and so many others thought it was okay to continue to ridicule me about something that I couldn’t help. I can comfortably now say, shame on them. Each and every family member or friend who ever teased me more than a few times about it should know that it really bothered me, and I have to work really hard to not continue to resent your laughter at my expense.

Did anyone actually think I would find it funny that I have no sense of direction? I always wanted to snap back and ask them what they thought it actually felt like to constantly worry that you will get lost trying to drive somewhere or even lost within a big building like a hospital. Does it make any difference that you yourself find it pretty easy to pay attention on how to get places and then it just sticks in your memory? No. It actually just proves your inability to accept that not everything in life that someone is “bad” at is the result of just not trying hard enough.

This got me thinking about the multi-layered meanings of the word “lost” and how it applies to my life.

It’s ironic that a childhood fear of literally being lost in the woods morphed into real-life situations of being lost while driving and on to feelings of being lost in the world as an adult. Like I mentioned earlier, it seems to be an underlying theme in my complex personality, I suppose.

Being given away as an infant – maybe subconsciously, I felt “lost” from the very beginning. My parents, as I know them, found me, but there was always a sense of still being lost.

Even though I gained two amazing parents, I lost my birthparents and any chance to grow up around family that share some of the same DNA. I lost my original identity and gained another one through no choice of my own and I guess you can only bury those feelings so deep before you have to dissect them.

Even as an adult I feel like it’s the “long-game” of feeling lost. I lost my son, I lost my dad, and I’ve lost myself at times. You can push it to the side, try to run passed it, but if you don’t work through it, it will never release its grip on you.

I encourage you to continue to work on yourself for your own benefit, not the benefit of others.

Finding yourself is hard work and I can promise you, that’s not lost on me.