Written December 2022, Tahiti, French Polynesia
Life is about learning how to lose, and 2022 sure as hell did everything it could to teach me that lesson.
I lost two out of three jobs and quit the third one myself—whether out of self-preservation or self-destruction, I still haven’t quite decided. I almost lost my mum, a kind of loss that retriggered old traumas and left me feeling helpless and just completely fucked up—again. I lost love, the kind that felt like home for a fleeting second, like lightning striking through a cloudy sky. I lost friendship in a way I didn’t fully understand, but I know better than to beg for someone to want to spend time with me. But most of all, I lost myself.
Not in a poetic, eat-pray-love kind of way, but in a fuck, where did I go? kind of way.
I forgot to take care of myself because my parents needed me. I forgot to be my own home because I thought I had found one in someone else. I made decisions rooted in chaos, in desperation, in the hope that movement—any movement—might fix what was broken. I sat on too many airplanes, letting parts of myself float somewhere in the clouds instead of landing as fully whole being.
It was a year of disruption. Of disassembling. Of forced surrender.
But here’s the thing about losing: it leaves room. It cracks you open, whether you like it or not, and in those gaps, something else finds its way in. And it might take some time, but you gotta trust me on this one.
I didn’t notice it at first. The space left by loss just felt like absence, like emptiness, like something missing, like something was inherently wrong with me. But then—slowly, quietly—life started to trickle in again. New people arrived, ones I never expected, reminding me that connection is sometimes about timing, not permanence. I deepened friendships with those who stayed, realizing that love isn’t just found in grand gestures, but in the people who quietly refuse to leave.
I remembered that my heart—tiny but stubborn—still has the capacity to hold light, even when weighed down by darkness.
And now, here I am, about to start a new job in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Something I never would have imagined a year ago. Something only made possible by a little loss here and there.
That’s the paradox of life, isn’t it? We cling so tightly to things, to people, to ideas of who we should be, terrified of losing them. But loss is inevitable. It will happen, over and over again, in ways big and small, until we stop fearing it and start understanding that it’s part of the process. A tough, beautiful, sometimes absurd and laughable process.
I don’t have a neat conclusion to this. No profound lesson wrapped up in a bow. I only know this: I lost a lot, but I gained something too. Not just new people, new places, new experiences—but a new version of myself. One who is still figuring things out. One who is still a little lost. But maybe, for the first time in a long time, that doesn’t feel like such a bad thing.
Because maybe being lost is just another way of making space for what’s next.
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