The Slow Disappearing

On the cycle of losing yourself and finding your way back

“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” — Henry David Thoreau

I don’t think we notice the moment we begin to disappear.

I’m a real person. Confident, brave, and I do the shit I wanna do. I know who I am. Or at least, I thought I did. But somewhere in the last few months, something shifted. I couldn’t tell you the exact moment, there wasn’t a single day where I woke up and felt lost. It was more like slowly losing confidence in myself, even though nothing really changed.

After I closed my bookshop, I was figuring out who I was becoming. That’s a real process, you guys. It doesn’t happen overnight. And I thought building this, the content, the Substack, the TikToks, would be part of that journey. A natural extension of who I’ve always been as a creative.

But I just started realizing I’ve been consuming a lot. And I was allowing myself to consume to that numbing feeling. There’s this fine line between inspiration and something unhealthy for your brain, for your chemistry, and it’s been such a battle trying to find it. You scroll and it starts as something real, something that sparks you. But then it shifts. And you don’t always notice when it happens. One moment you’re inspired, the next you’re numb.

Okay but I’ve been here before, this isn’t new. I literally built an analog bag for this exact reason. I wrote a whole essay about doom scrolling as self-soothing that doesn’t even soothe. I know this pattern well enough to teach a class on it at this point. And yet here I am again, same edge, having the same “realization” like it just occurred to me for the first time. That’s honestly the part I want to sit with here, not the scrolling itself, but why I keep needing to relearn the same thing.

And here’s the thing. Not a lot of people say this out loud. Life is fucking hard. And when life gets hard, you reach for the thing that makes you feel nothing. Scrolling does that perfectly. It numbs you. It’s easy. It’s right there.

The pressure started creeping in. Create more. Post consistently. Have your shit together. Be polished, be strategic, be the woman who’s got it all figured out. And the more I consumed, the more I doubted what I was already doing. The flat lays everyone loves. The what’s in my bag. The books I’m reading. Suddenly it all felt small, or not enough, or like I was missing something everyone else had figured out.

But that’s not me. I’m messy. I’m in the middle of becoming, and I’m okay with that. I don’t shrink myself to fit anyone else’s version of anything. I’m as real as they get. And somewhere in all the consumption and the pressure and the noise, I let myself get so influenced that I started doubting the very things that make me me.

I know growth isn’t a straight line. I’m forty-four, I didn’t just learn that. But knowing something and actually living like it’s true are apparently two different things, because here I am again, same loop, a little more awake each time, and if I’m honest, a little more burnt out and frustrated too. But I’m trying to give myself grace here instead of just judgment. I don’t think I’m going to stop needing the analog bag. I don’t think I’m going to stop doom scrolling before I catch myself, not fully, not ever probably. But I caught it faster this time than I did back in February, and I’m choosing to count that as something.

The messy middle isn’t a place I get to and just stay there. It’s more like a place I keep getting pulled back to, and maybe that’s actually the practice, not fixing myself for good, just noticing a little sooner each time. Thanks for being on this journey with me, cycle and all.

xo, Leslie