Maybe You Haven't Lost Yourself. Maybe Another Part of You Is Having Its Season.
"I don't feel like myself anymore."
I have said this more times than I can count. Usually after a move. Sometimes in the middle of one. Sometimes just on an ordinary Tuesday when life feels quietly unfamiliar and I can't quite explain why.
For a long time, I understood that feeling as loss.
I thought that every country I left took something with it. That the version of me who existed there, who knew where to buy groceries, who had friends, who had a rhythm, disappeared when I packed my bags and moved on. That somewhere across thirteen countries and twenty-three years, I had become a scattered collection of former selves, and I wasn't entirely sure who the real one was anymore.
It's a disorienting feeling. And if you've moved, once, twice, or many times over, you may know exactly what I mean.
But over time, I've begun to see it differently. Not as loss. As something quieter and stranger and, I think, more true.
What if I wasn't losing myself with each move? What if each place was simply allowing a different part of me to come forward?
Looking back now, I can trace it clearly.
Vietnam was where the adventurous part of me woke up. I started Kung Fu. I rented a motorbike and took long solo rides into the countryside, navigating roads I didn't know, trusting myself to find the way back. Vietnam reminded me I was capable of being brave. That I could step into the completely unknown and not fall apart.
Russia brought forward something quieter. I walked everywhere. I slowed down. I learned the language, reconnected with my spirituality, and found that sitting with discomfort, really sitting with it, not rushing past it, was its own kind of strength. Russia taught me patience. It taught me to look deeper and listen more carefully.
Japan invited a part of me I hadn't really met before. The part that could be still. Green tea ceremonies. Crochet. Wandering through streets of blossoms. I learned that belonging doesn't always come through doing more. Sometimes it comes through simply paying attention to what's in front of you.
And China - China was where the seeds of everything I do now began to grow. It was there that I discovered art journaling and began to understand, slowly and then all at once, that creativity wasn't just something I enjoyed. It was how I processed life. How I reached the emotions that didn't have words yet. The part of me that would eventually build Healing Art Journey began quietly waking up in China.
Not one of these was a different person. They were all me. Just different parts, called forward by different places and different seasons.
I think many women living abroad carry a quiet fear underneath all the adapting: Who am I now?
We move, we change, we become fluent in new ways of being. And somewhere in that process we start to wonder if we've drifted too far from ourselves. We look for the person we were before. The one who felt settled, recognisable, at home in her own skin.
But what if that version was never meant to be the only version?
What if we aren't losing ourselves through all this change - we are simply meeting more of ourselves?
I still miss the part of me who cycled through the mountains in Canada. Wild, free, completely connected to her body and the open air. But I don't see her as gone anymore. She's still there. She's simply resting. Waiting for another season when she can come forward again.
I think that's true for the parts of ourselves we feel we've lost. They haven't disappeared. They're just not the ones having their season right now.
This is one of the reasons I love using art for reflection, because images can hold things that words sometimes can't quite reach.
A garden is never the same from one season to the next. Some things are in full bloom. Some are seeds quietly doing their work underground. Some branches look bare but aren't dead, they're simply waiting. And a good gardener doesn't panic at the parts that aren't flowering yet. She tends them anyway. She trusts the season.
We are the same.
Some parts of you are blooming right now. Some are resting. Some are still waiting for the right conditions to come forward. None of them are gone.
If this resonates with you, I'd gently invite you to try this:
Take a blank page and draw or paint a garden - yours. It doesn't need to be beautiful or realistic. Let each flower, plant, or patch of earth represent a different part of you. The adventurous part. The quiet part. The playful one. The one who needs rest. The one who hasn't quite found her season yet.
Notice what's blooming. Notice what's still beneath the soil. Not absent. Not lost. Simply waiting.
And if you want somewhere to begin, somewhere gentle, with space to reflect and create: my free workbook Healing While Abroad was made for exactly this kind of moment.