The Unraveling Rupture of Figuring It Out

We’re all addicted to something. Even the most ordinary things can hold us tight without us noticing. Love. Attention. People. The feeling of being needed. All of it. With that out in the open, I’ll say it simply: I’m an addict. To many things. But mostly, I’m addicted to being me. I love being who I am so much that I’m scared of losing it. That fear makes it hard to accept change. The more afraid you are of losing something, the more attached you get. You start to believe you can’t go on without it. And sometimes, to really let go, you have to lose it completely. That’s what happened. I lost the thing I was most afraid to lose. Myself.

Life doesn’t always hurt you on purpose. It just refuses to let you stay in your comfort zone. It doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It doesn’t care if you’re tired. It wants you to move. Grow. Do something.

Meanwhile, your nervous system is doing the opposite. It’s trying to protect you. To keep you safe. That’s why we keep choosing what we know. Even when it’s painful. Even when it’s destroying us quietly. We call it safety, but really, it’s just our familiar hell.

I was forced out of mine, no matter how much I tried to cling to it. Pushed into a hell on my own terms. When you lose all the pieces of yourself, all the things you thought made you who you are, it’s like the floor is ripped out from under you. You’re standing there with nothing to hold on to. No idea when the storm will pass, no sense of direction, no way of knowing if you’ll ever return to what you left behind or if it will even be there.

People like to romanticise uncertainty. They call it exciting, freeing. I never saw it that way. I found it terrifying. But being in it taught me something I didn’t expect even certainty can feel just as frightening.

Fear is older than we are. It has always been part of survival. It told early humans to stay away from predators, to fear the dark, to find fire. Fear wasn’t the enemy. It was a compass. It still is, in its own way. I don’t see it as good or bad. It’s just part of us. And like anything, when it grows too big, it can crush you.

But fear has worn different faces for me. Have you ever been afraid of fear itself? I have. I’ve felt it wrap around me before I even moved. I’ve seen myself step back before I even tried. The act of taking a step forward is taken for granted by most of us. On a literal sense, we’ve been taking steps without even building a sense of who we are. I started on my first birthday, out of sheer determination to catch up with my sisters, who are all ten years older than me. That’s where everything begins for me. With them.

Even though they now take up a much smaller space in my life, they are my origin story. The first people I admired. I used to ask my mother why she had me so late, because all I wanted was to be closer to them. I wanted to be like them. Eventually, I wanted to become a sister myself. That was my very first dream. When people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say, “a sister.”

Of course, I never became one. Not really. The truth is I almost wasn’t born at all. After ten years, no one expects another child. My parents only tried again because my father wanted a son. That was supposed to be my purpose. And I couldn’t even fulfil it. I grew up knowing, in quiet ways, that my existence came with a kind of disappointment attached to it. But not all stories begin the way they’re meant to end.

In the beginning of my recovery, I felt untouchable. I looked back at everything I had survived and thought, nothing could ever break me again. Life doesn’t give you a warning when it changes. Somewhere in the middle of it, I started forgetting. Not who I was, but what I’d already made it through.

Still, I remind myself. Who I am. Where I came from. Because my story deserves to be claimed.

Starting from the day I was born might sound cliché, but it’s the only way that makes sense to me. The past doesn’t disappear. It stays where it is, shaping us quietly, finding its way into everything we do. We think memory is fixed, that it tells the truth. It doesn’t. It bends, stretches, folds in on itself. But it still anchors us.

Sometimes I stop and realise how many different versions of myself I’ve had to become just to keep going. Maybe that’s what identity is. I don’t think we’re made of a single self. I think we’re made of layers. People carry fragments. Faces. Roles. Selves they don’t even realise they’re wearing.

At the core of each one is the instinct to survive. Humans adapt. That’s what we do. Just like fear, that instinct has always been there. Survival no longer looks like running from predators or building fires. Now it takes different shapes. For some, it’s achievement. For others, invisibility. Silence. Overcompensation. Numbness.

When life hits you with something big like loss, change or rupture, your old self starts to shed. You pull away from who you were. You cocoon. You go quiet. You wait for the next version to form.

That’s where I am now. Weaving my cocoon. Deciding what gets to come in. Paying attention to what I’ll need for the person I haven’t met yet.

Everyone says your twenties are chaos. I’ve always believed the best years are the ones that come after. Your twenties are the blueprint years. No one gives you instructions. You figure it out by getting it wrong. You stumble forward. You try.

I like that part. The trying. It makes the pain real. It makes the process matter. Still, some endings cut deeper than others. I went through a heartbreak that almost split my identity in half. It made me realise that what’s most frightening isn’t being alone or being lost. It’s confronting the undoing of your entire self-story, pierced by a look that silently insists you were never worthy of love.

I used to believe there was someone who understood me. Fully. Loved me because of the chaos, not despite of it. Spoke to me like a spell, compelling me to strip away every piece of armour I wore. I let it all be seen.

My heart. My illness. My fear. My softness.

And that’s exactly where it hurt.

So now, from this place where I’ve been forced to rebuild again, my story traces back to the very first time I was broken. The first and deepest heartbreak I ever carried. The one that came quietly, settled deep, and rewrote the way I carried every heartbreak after.