Confidently Lost

What looks like wandering is sometimes initiation—each detour carving the skin to fit the name already whispered in the womb.

For a long time, I mistook movement for direction. I jumped from one version of myself to the next, thinking maybe clarity would meet me there. But it was the repetition that taught me. The failures. The friction. The quiet patterns underneath every loud decision.

There are people who need vision boards and five-year plans. I was not one of them. The destination was never in question. The shape of it—what it would look like, how it would come together—that part was flexible. But the essence? The feeling in my chest when I imagined the life I came here to live? That was fixed. It came before memory. Before logic. Before the world had a chance to convince me otherwise.

But the knowing didn’t protect me.
It didn’t stop me from making decisions out of fear, or from staying too long in places I had long outgrown. It didn’t save me from the long years of detours, or from mistaking comfort for alignment. Knowing is not the same as arriving. And direction—especially spiritual direction—is not always a straight line.

There were moments I could barely recognize myself.
Not because I was lost, but because I was wearing lives that didn’t belong to me.
Degrees I didn’t care about.
Relationships I shrank myself to fit into.
Jobs that looked impressive on paper but made me sick in my spirit.
It was easier to explain those versions of me to other people. They looked stable. They looked functional. They looked like someone who knew what they were doing.

But I did know. That was the problem.
I knew too early.
And early knowing makes you inconvenient.
You become the one who makes people uncomfortable. The one who doesn’t settle. The one who says no too quickly, or leaves too easily, or expects too much. You start questioning whether the clarity you have is a gift—or a burden you’ll spend your life justifying.

Grief sits in the space between vision and proof.
You start bargaining. Maybe if I’m less intense, people will stay.
Maybe if I choose something more relatable, more explainable, I won’t have to keep defending my life to people who only know how to measure worth in milestones.

Eventually, the nervous system starts speaking louder than your mouth ever could.
It speaks through tightness. Through the feeling of being watched even when no one is in the room. Through the moment your hands go cold at a job interview because something in you already knows—this is not it.

⸻

I remember sitting across from my boss after weeks of mounting anxiety. The kind of anxiety that greets you before you even open your eyes in the morning. My heart would race before my laptop even turned on. I hadn’t felt like I belonged there from the beginning, but I needed money. And this job—this six-figure title with no real work-life balance and no real support—had become the most money I had ever made in my life.

They had promised me help. More hands. A lighter load. A promotion. And when I finally spoke up—when I said this job was affecting my mental health, that I had healed so much and was terrified of unraveling again—their solution wasn’t support. It was a 50% raise.

They told me, with a smile, that now I could afford more therapy.
That I could start paying for anti-anxiety medication.
That I could manage the very symptoms their environment had reawakened.

I walked out of that meeting feeling like something inside me had been spit on.
Because the message was clear:
We’re not going to make this easier for you. We’re just going to pay you enough to make your suffering more efficient.

It didn’t matter how much I made. I was breaking.
And that kind of breaking doesn’t scream. It goes quiet.
It happens on the bathroom floor, in the middle of the day, in between back-to-back Zoom meetings.

If staying means losing myself, then leaving is the only way home.

There was a shift. It wasn’t loud, but total.
Something rearranged inside me, and suddenly what used to feel bearable became impossible to carry.

And maybe that’s what this path has always been about—not chasing something far away, but becoming someone who could hold what I already knew was mine.

⸻

Once you see it clearly, everything begins to shift.
The relationship. The routine. The reasons you used to tell yourself it was okay to stay.
You try to keep going like nothing’s changed, but your body has already left the room.
And the more you pretend, the heavier it gets—until even the smallest compromise feels like self-betrayal.

The shift didn’t give me relief.
It gave me responsibility.
Because now I had to choose what I already knew.
And that meant confronting every story I’d built around endurance.
Every version of me that was designed to be easy to love, to manage, to praise.
I didn’t just have to leave what wasn’t aligned.
I had to admit that I had stayed on purpose.
That I had made a life out of almosts because I was afraid of the emptiness that might follow choosing myself completely.

That kind of honesty isn’t always clean.
It can be humiliating.
It makes you grieve things you were still inside of.
It makes you walk out of rooms that still have your name on the wall.
It makes you answer questions you weren’t ready to ask.

Who am I when I’m not performing ease?
What happens when I stop explaining my choices to people who are committed to misunderstanding me?
What opens when I stop managing everyone else’s comfort before my own?

No one talks about the emotional fallout that follows clarity.
The way your body resists the freedom it begged for.
The way letting go feels more like unraveling than release.
The way shedding your past selves can feel like betrayal even when it’s the most honest thing you’ve ever done.

But that unraveling?
That in-between?
That’s where the real return begins.

Because it means you’re finally in the space between who you were and who you’re willing to become.

⸻

I once wrote down everything I wanted in a man.
His smile. His values. The way he’d hold me. How he’d speak to me. What he believed about family. What kind of money he made. What kind of eyes he had. I wrote it with the kind of precision that comes after surviving what you never want to go through again. I had spent years single, recovering from an abusive relationship. And when I finally reached a place of peace—when I was back in my body, when I loved my own company, when I could feel myself again—I thought I was ready.

So I made the list.
I connected to the Creator.
I offered up my desires.
And I called him in.

And he came.
The man I described down to the detail. Everything I asked for—he had.
He said all the right things. He made me feel safe. The conversation flowed. He looked at me like he meant it. I even did check-ins with my body, slow ones. Easeful. Natural. It all felt clear.

But I remember the first time I ignored my body.
That other relationship—the one I had to heal from.
Even after the very first date, the message had been loud: don’t trust this.
I felt it. I heard it. I stayed anyway.

So when the whisper came this time—the quiet knowing that didn’t shout, didn’t panic, didn’t plead—I recognized it.
It said: this isn’t it.
And this time, I listened.

I said goodbye to the man of my dreams.
And in doing so, I opened the door to someone I couldn’t have dreamed of.

This love wasn’t curated.
It wasn’t built from a checklist.
It just fit.
It found me as I was—whole, open, unedited.

This time, I didn’t have to earn love by abandoning parts of myself.
I was able to give.
And he caught it like someone who knew what to do with it.

And through that relationship, I received something I had never asked for but always needed:
A love who saw the whole of me without flinching.

He didn’t just meet my desires—he met my soul.
He made me feel like myself.
He made me feel like I was already home.

Some choices look irrational from the outside.
Some endings make no sense on paper.
But the most life-giving decisions are often the ones you can’t explain until you’re living in the peace they made possible.

I couldn’t have written this love.
Because I hadn’t yet met the version of me that could receive it.
I didn’t just walk away from a man.
I walked toward myself.

⸻

I kept waiting for the sign to be big—sky-splitting, time-stopping, the kind of moment that rewrites you without asking. But the turning point came quieter than that.

Sometimes, the confirmations that guide us deepest come in subtle flashes. A sentence overheard while waiting in line. A feather on the ground after a silent prayer. A dream you can’t explain but can’t forget. Other times, they roar through the sky—dolphins circling the boat, a whale breaching beside you, triple rainbows stretching over traffic like the universe just said yes.

Sometimes the quietest voices have the loudest messages.
The signs speak both ways. Loud and soft. Drenched in magic, and laced into the mundane.
That quiet voice you almost ignored?
Sometimes, that’s the one that leads you to everything you’ve been praying for.

I had been in a space waiting for someone else to hand me the map—to point and say:
“Start here, end there, and follow these steps so you don’t get it wrong.”
But no one had ever walked this road before.
And that was the whole point.

It was mine to navigate.
Mine to interpret.
Mine to trust.

⸻

Mentors will come. Teachers will guide. Elders will bless your steps.
But no one can walk it for you.
That part is yours.

This path began with presence. With the decision to stop delaying what I already knew. With the choice to trust what stirred, even when I didn’t know where it would lead. And that choice changed everything.

Guidance moves like water. Sometimes it pours. Sometimes it drips. Sometimes it swells in your chest and speaks through you in a voice that feels ancient and familiar all at once.

The Divine doesn’t only speak in fire or thunder. It speaks in perfect timing. In the lyrics of a song that answers the question you were too afraid to ask. In the moment your breath deepens for no reason—except something in you finally feels right.

And when you start walking in alignment with that voice, something shifts. You start recognizing the cues. You stop fighting the detours. You begin to feel yourself returning—not to what was, but to what’s always been waiting.

Eventually, you realize: the road is being made as you walk it. With every choice that honors your intuition. With every step that says, “I will not abandon myself this time.”

⸻

But this journey doesn’t only require something from you. It offers, too. It gives back in ways that rewrite your very understanding of grace.

Love that sees you and stays. Synchronicities that leave your mouth open and your knees soft. Magic that enters the room without knocking.

And yes, the mystery is still there. There are still days when the signs feel blurred and I long for someone to go first, to say, “Yes, this is the right way. Yes, you’re almost there.” But if you let yourself pause—if you stay long enough to hear beneath the noise—you’ll feel it.

You’re already on the way. You haven’t missed it. You are it.

And what meets you now? Beauty. Divine timing. Moments so precise, they feel like they were placed there with your name on them. A kind of grace that reminds you you were never lost—you were being led. Always.

⸻

This part counts too.
The late nights you almost gave up.
The mornings you rose anyway.
The stretch between clarity and arrival.
The hunger of wanting to know, and the courage to keep going without it.
The hours that look like nothing but are shaping everything.
This is still the way.

⸻

I remember landing in London with nothing but a one-way ticket and a prayer.

Everyone back home was settling—into marriages, into motherhood, into mortgages.
And I was just beginning to feel myself again after an illness that had hollowed out more than just my strength.
I didn’t know if children would be possible for me. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted them.
All I knew was that I couldn’t keep living the life I was living.
My job felt like I had hit a wall.
My body had carried too much for too long.
My spirit was begging for more.

I thought London might be that more.

There were a few prospects waiting when I arrived—emails that sounded promising, a bed to sleep in, an interview or two.
But the truth was, none of it turned into what I thought it would.
There were nights the city felt like it was swallowing me whole.
The language was the same, but everything else was different.
The pace. The rules. The way presence didn’t always mean invitation.
There were days I wondered if I’d made a mistake, if I was just running from one form of stagnation to another.

But something deeper kept me there.

Even when the doors didn’t open the way I’d hoped, I stayed.
Even when the loneliness thickened, I stayed.
Even when the old patterns showed up with new names and new faces, I stayed.
I didn’t know what would come next, I just knew I was there to learn—and made peace with wanting something more.

London showed me what had always been in me but never fully claimed.
It revealed the truth I hadn’t yet spoken: I’m an artist. A teacher. A storyteller.
That dream didn’t bloom in London. But its seed was planted.
And sometimes that’s everything.

Sometimes the purpose of a place isn’t permanence—it’s what gets illuminated when you let unfamiliar ground hold you. The season didn’t lead to a permanent address. But it led me closer to myself. And that glimpse—that brief, undeniable alignment—can be everything.

⸻

When you move with conviction, the light hits different.

And suddenly the prayers shift.
They don’t sound like please—they sound like thank you.
The longing doesn’t disappear. It becomes devotion.
The waiting doesn’t waste you. It ripens you.
The stillness doesn’t stall you. It roots you.

The yes arrives as recognition—familiar, inevitable, exact.

Some people search for signs.
You become one.
Proof that movement is movement.
Proof that direction unfolds in its own time.
Even when the path remains unclear.
It’s lived. It’s learned. It leads.

To be confidently lost is to no longer chase direction.
It’s to stop asking where you’re going and start listening to the way your own footsteps answer back.

I’m still on my way. You’re still on yours. The journey keeps moving. And that’s the point.

One love, ESS xo