When You Don't Feel Like Yourself Anymore: The Person You Are Trying To Get Back To

Before the redundancy. Before the divorce. Before the betrayal. Before the illness. Before life knocked the wind out of you. You just don't feel like yourself anymore.

Most people can name the moment, even if they would rather not. The thing that happened, or arrived without warning, after which you kept going, kept performing, kept everything intact, and told nobody. You kept going because that is what you do, and because stopping to examine it felt like a luxury, or a risk, or both.

The world saw a composed, capable person getting on with things. What the world did not see was the internal commentary. Exhausted and perpetually on alert for the next thing to go wrong. You did not talk about it much. Most people assumed you were fine because you kept functioning, and after a while it became easier to let them.

But something had shifted in how you moved through the world. Rooms you once walked into without thinking now make you hesitate. Decisions that used to be unremarkable take longer than they should. You edit yourself before you speak and replay it afterwards, running the whole exchange back repeatedly: what you said, to whom, their reaction, what they must think. More defensive than you used to be, already braced for attack and starting to see it everywhere. A look, an offhand comment, something you would previously have let pass without registering it. It suddenly gets under your skin.

You put it down to workload, or lack of sleep, or a difficult period. It took far longer to notice how much you had changed.

The alert that protected you then is still running now.

The boomerang yet you don't feel like yourself

I had come back from working on a film set as a supporting artiste. I had not laughed like that in years.

Then I came home to my office, only my dogs for company, surrounded by silence. Nobody to joke with. The contrast floored me.

It also coincided with getting back out to see people from my old network for the first time since I left my career in asset management two years ago. Among people still inside that world, the assumption for why I left seems to be that something went wrong. That what I am building now is a consolation rather than a considered choice.

I did not appreciate until afterwards how triggering both had been. The salary, the holidays, the predictability, the ease of knowing what to do and how to do it well with a clear identity and a pay cheque that removed financial anxiety. I was comparing where I could have been by now if I had stayed against where I am, and for a brief period I wondered if I had miscalculated. That made me question my purpose, why I had left in the first place, whether I had left for the right reasons at all. Doubt kicked in and then shame and so the spiral started.

For a few days, the loop had the better of me. My head was not a pleasant place to be. I am a far harsher bully to myself than any I have met in real life. I also reached for an old coping habit that had never helped. It did not help this time either. Understanding why my head does this does not stop it happening. It just means I catch it faster now.

What I had to remind myself was what that world cost me before I started missing it.

What the body does

For years I thought I was simply ageing badly. I was exhausted most of the time. My knees were deteriorating and my weight had climbed through lack of mobility and stress keeping me at my desk long hours. I was living on cortisol and caffeine, telling myself this was what professional life looked like in your forties and fifties if you wanted to keep progressing and were the breadwinner with others reliant on you. In retrospect, not an especially sophisticated health strategy.

A lot of people are doing the same thing now. You wake up tired, struggle to concentrate in the way you once could, notice your patience shortening and your sleep becoming unreliable, then put it all down to age. I no longer think that explanation accounts for as much as we pretend it does.

About twelve years ago I was involved in a traumatic accident with my littlest that I did not process until many years later. In the meantime I held it entirely alone. Kept functioning while the pain, shame, and grief ran underneath. I blamed myself for something that was not my fault and held onto that guilt and fear every day in an attempt to ensure nothing like that ever happened again.

It made me quicker to anger, more defensive, easier to wound. Every critical comment found the bruise. Every difficult interaction became confirmation of a verdict I was already running privately about myself.

It was only when I finally worked through the experience directly that the defensiveness began to ease and the physical symptoms followed. The change happened far faster than I expected.

The accident was the obvious one. It was not the only one. My father's death. Relationships ending. Professional disappointments, slights and setbacks I thought I had brushed off. Each time I carried on. Each time I trusted people a little less. I did not connect any of it until much later. By then it had been running for years. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Two griefs that need naming

Most people do not lose their confidence overnight. It erodes through a long series of small adaptations, becoming more watchful, trying not to get things wrong or draw unnecessary criticism, until the caution becomes habitual and you stop noticing you are doing it. At some point you realise you do not laugh like you once did. Everything feels a bit muted.

A friend of mine recently admitted that since becoming a mother she grieves the life she no longer has. She loves her children without question. But she misses the confidence and spontaneity she had before. Being able to take risks. Being able to go to the toilet by herself.

You do the same. You think you are mourning the thing that changed. The role, the relationship, your health, the opportunity. You move past it because it feels self-indulgent, because someone along the way told you that you should be over it by now. What often goes unnamed is the loss of the person you were before it happened.

And you are probably trying to address one while the other continues to run underneath.

Bounce back to what, exactly.

The person you are trying to get back to did not know what you know now.

If you face what happened instead of endlessly working around it, it stops affecting you in quite the same way. You still remember what happened but it does not run your life in the same way. You still wobble at times, but you trust your own judgement more and spend less time needing approval or catastrophising every mistake. You stop replaying conversations in your head at stupid o'clock. You laugh more and spend less of your life braced for impact.

I looked at what the wobble had stirred up and was annoyed to discover some of it was not as dealt with as I had assumed. I had to be honest about whether I was romanticising my old life or whether I just missed the familiarity, the certainty, the structure, the people. What I am building now still feels uncertain at times. Discomfort does not mean I made the wrong decision. Usually it means part of you is still trying to get back to who you were before it happened.

Where this leaves you

If you recognise yourself in any of this, there is usually more underneath it than workload, age, or a difficult period. You can carry these patterns for years longer than necessary, assuming this is simply who you are now.

It is not. It is who you became in response to something you never fully dealt with.

A Catalyst Day is a private one-to-one intensive. One day to face the thing you thought you had moved past rather than spending another few years reacting to it.

If that conversation feels overdue, you are welcome to reach out. rosinabarnett.com