Coming Back to Yourself

There's a version of you that exists underneath all of it. Underneath the to-do lists and the deadlines, underneath being someone's mother, someone's daughter, someone building something from scratch with tired hands. She's not lost exactly. She's just been waiting.

I've been thinking about her a lot lately.

A few weeks ago I found myself looking through old hobbies, the things I used to do just because they made me feel alive. Art. Drawing. The dream of pottery that never quite happened. I picked them up in my mind, turned them over, felt something warm and familiar stir in my chest. And then I put them back down.I don't have time for this right now. Back to the pressing things. Back to the practical.

But here's what stayed with me: I looked. Something in me went searching for her, and that matters more than I first gave it credit for.

Coming back to yourself isn't always a grand re-entry. It's rarely the dramatic reinvention or the two-week retreat or the morning you wake up and suddenly feel like yourself again. More often it's a flicker. A moment where you catch a glimpse of who you are when no one needs anything from you. When there's no role to perform and no output to produce.

For me, that self lives somewhere near the smell of new art supplies. Near the quiet concentration of making something with your hands that has no function other than to exist. There's a version of me that opens a set of paints and feels genuinely, unhurriedly alive. I don't visit her as often as I should. But I know she's there. And I know what she feels like, joyful, present, soft in a way that the building and the striving doesn't always allow.

I think that's what coming back to yourself really asks of you. Not that you overhaul your life or carve out hours you don't have. But that you stay in some kind of relationship with who you are at your core, outside of your roles, outside of your productivity, outside of what you're trying to become.

Because here's the thing I keep returning to: even when I can't reach her, I know who I want to be. I want to be loving. I want to be joyful. I want to be someone who makes things, who notices beauty, who doesn't always sacrifice the tender parts of herself at the altar of the urgent.

That wanting is not nothing. That wanting is the compass.

You might be in a season right now where you've had to put things down. Where the hobbies are on a shelf and the paint is still in the box and the version of you that has time and spaciousness feels very far away. I'm not going to tell you to make more time, or that it's just a matter of prioritising yourself. You know your life. You know what's on your plate.

What I will say is this: don't stop looking for her. Don't stop noticing the moments when something in you reaches, even briefly, toward the things that make you feel like yourself. That reaching is important. It's a thread. And as long as you're still holding onto it, you haven't lost your way back.

Coming home to yourself is rarely one big moment. It's a hundred small acts of remembering. A smell. A flicker. A quiet wish that one day you'll have time for the pottery.

One day, maybe. But right now, just knowing she's still there is enough.

With all the love in the world.
Saski xx