I didn't realise I'd lost myself
until I was already gone

I remember standing in a queue at Tesco — a completely ordinary Tuesday — and someone asked me what I'd been up to lately.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

Not because I was busy. Not because I was tired. Because I genuinely didn't know the answer. I couldn't think of a single thing I'd done recently that was mine. Something I'd chosen. Something I'd wanted. The last few weeks were just other people's needs, stitched together into days.

I smiled and said something about the kids and the house and work being mad, and the conversation moved on. But I stood there for the next five minutes feeling something I couldn't name. A hollowness. A faint, low-level grief for something I couldn't quite put my finger on.

It took me a long time to work out what that was.

It was me. I was grieving myself.

I thought I was just tired

That's what I told myself for months. I'm just tired. I was — God, I was exhausted in a way that sleep wasn't touching. But underneath the exhaustion was something quieter and harder to look at.

I'd stopped knowing what I liked. Not in a dramatic way — nobody took it from me. I just stopped asking. Stopped checking in. Every decision I made was in relation to someone else. What did the kids need? What would make things easier for my husband? What did work require? What would cause the least friction?

My own preferences had become such a foreign language that when someone asked me what I fancied for dinner, I genuinely found it difficult to answer.

I'm a counsellor. I spend my days helping people connect with themselves. I know what losing yourself looks like. I teach people to recognise it.

I just hadn't noticed it happening to me.

It doesn't happen all at once

There's no moment. No decision. No single sacrifice that tips you over the edge.

It's the holiday you didn't push for because it would've been too much hassle. The hobby you quietly set down when life got busy and never picked back up. The friendship you kept showing up for even though it always left you emptier than before. The feelings you swallowed in your relationship because the timing was never quite right — and then the timing was never right again, and then you stopped noticing you were swallowing them.

It's years of putting yourself at the bottom of the list. Not because you're a martyr. Not because you don't value yourself. But because you're a capable, caring woman in a world that rewards you endlessly for giving, and barely notices when you're running on nothing.

Forty-something is a particular kind of complicated

I'm 46. My kids are growing up and needing me less, which is exactly what I raised them to do — and yet the grief of it surprises me daily. My body is doing things I wasn't warned about. The brain fog. The mood shifts. The mornings where I can't find a word I've known for thirty years.

Perimenopause has a way of making you feel like you're losing your mind at exactly the same time life is asking you to figure out who you are without the roles that have defined you.

Nobody really talks about the identity part. We talk about the hot flushes and the hormone patches. We don't often talk about the sitting-in-a-supermarket-car-park-crying-and-not-knowing-why part. The is this it? part. The quiet 3am wondering if you've somehow used up your best years without noticing.

I'm not writing this to tell you I have the answers

I'm writing this because I sat in that feeling for longer than I should have. Because I know how much it matters to simply feel like someone sees it.

Not to fix it. Not to offer a five-step plan. Just to say: I know that feeling. It's real. You're not ungrateful. You're not weak. You're not broken or dramatic or going through some kind of cliché midlife crisis.

You're a woman who has been giving and giving, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, forgot to include herself.

The fact that something in you is sitting up and paying attention right now — the fact that you read this far — tells me that some part of you is ready to start coming back.

Where do you even start?

You start by being honest with yourself about where you actually are. Not where you should be. Not where you're performing to be. Where you actually are.

I've put together a short, free self-reflection checklist — not a quiz, not a diagnostic tool. Just a quiet set of questions to sit with. It's called Are You Losing Yourself? and it's the kind of thing I wish someone had handed me a few years ago. A mirror, not a verdict.

Take it somewhere quiet. Make yourself a cup of tea. Be honest.