Being Lost

Being lost invites surprise and adventure. Back when I was less ill, I relished opportunities to go wandering about and get properly lost, open to whatever I found in my amblings. There’s also a real joy to having been lost and emerging into a place that is familiar.

Being existentially lost could work the same way, and I’m trying to figure out how to approach my own life with the same sense of wonder and possibility. I don’t know where I am right now, or what I’m for, or where I’m going or what to do. I thought I knew, and I thought I was on a meaningful trajectory, but experiences of late have turned that upside down and I have no idea about anything.

It may well be a question of belief. I have no doubt that I need to pour myself wholeheartedly into something, and I don’t know where to do that. I need to be able to imagine that whatever I’m doing is worth doing, but I don’t know how to define or measure worth. I’m enough of an existentialist to think that meaning is something we have to make for ourselves, but right now I also have no idea how to do that.

I feel like I should get a ‘proper’ job. I feel like I should go and live in a tree and pretend to be an owl. My body is fragile and my mind also, and I feel like I should invest in healing as best I can and I feel like I’m probably being silly and should just get out there and act like there’s nothing wrong with me. I have no idea whether to take myself seriously. I should be living in a cave and speaking only with bats. I should apply to become a dinner lady. I should hang from a meathook in the underworld and work out how not to be dead.

I need to believe in something enough that it sets me on fire and gives me a way to make sense of the world. I am not good at belief. I wonder if instead I need someone else to believe in me enough that I can see what I’m for and who to be. I don’t know if I need to let go of everything, or to find some peaceful, certain centre in myself. Am I meant to be chaos?

There is rage and grief in this lostness, and I have no idea what I’m cross with. Except possibly that the work I want to do and the work that pays are not the same things at all. Everything is falling apart, and my own fractal of a tiny crisis inside the much bigger crisis does not help, and sorting myself out will not magically fix anything else.

Perhaps being an owl is a good choice. The yearning for something wilder, and weirder is strong right now. Perhaps my lostness is because I need to be found, perhaps it is not on me to do the finding.