She was ambitious, and fiery and persistent. She was idealistic, passionate and determinedly optimistic. She was me. And then I lost her.  

I didn’t even really know how it had happened, and I don’t think I even noticed at the time. Life had gotten in the way, as it tends to do. I assumed she’d come back to me at some point. All I needed to do was wait it out.  

But months turned into years, and She was still noticeably absent.  

I didn’t understand it. I was still pushing towards my goals, still chasing my dreams and that was supposed to be where I was found, not where I was lost.  

New things were happening in my life, and even though they felt good and made me happy, I still felt so stuck. There was a part of me missing and I felt the absence deeply. 

The stuck-ness was coming out in all areas of my life, but especially creatively. I struggled to write anything at all. It felt too hard to even attempt it. Those long-held dreams that I had felt further away than ever, and I didn’t know if I even believed in them anymore.  

No matter how hard I tried to write, it all felt shallow and inauthentic. I hated everything I created.  

And I cringed whenever my people, the ones who love me dearly, tried to encourage me by talking about my potential; that elusive, magic dust that doesn’t exist and yet somehow, I was still wasting all of it.  

This year life slowed right down, and I slowed down with it. I had more time with myself than ever before, without the ability to distract with work or social engagements. I found myself in a neighbourhood I hadn’t visited in a long time. The last time I was there, was before I lost Her.  

In a cascade of memories that were unlocked by retreading that old ground, I remembered who she was, who I had been. It was a weird experience that surprised me with the grief it also brought along with it.  

I looked at those decade-old memories with new eyes – the kind of perspective shift that only distance and experience can bring. And there She was in the centre of it all – the young woman I had been, with fire in her soul.  

I missed Her. I mourned Her. And I was so angry with myself for letting Her go.  

For a week I sat with heavy feelings of anxiousness, regret, and disappointment, and it was a heaviness I couldn’t shift.  

At the time, I had frequently judged Her as naive, silly even. But as I looked at Her with new eyes, I realised She had also been fearless, brave and loud about who She was and what She wanted. 

It was only then that I began to grieve Her properly. For maybe the first time. She had been gone for so long and I didn’t even know how to get Her back.  

How could I have lost Her and not even noticed? Where the hell was She? And had She abandoned me or was it the other way around?  

How was I supposed to get Her back? 

I combed back through those memories of the last place I remembered seeing Her like I was solving an Agatha Christie mystery. As I hunted through them, retracing the steps of ghosts, I realised She wasn’t lost at all; I had buried Her – locked Her away with memories I would rather have forgotten and painful experiences I wished had never happened.  

I had been arrogant, I think, to believe myself too self-aware to commit as basic an act of self-sabotage as burying my feelings.  

Here I was, a decade later, re-examining a part of my life that I didn’t even remember I had been trying to ignore.  

I had locked it all away so I could breathe. And it had worked, it had helped me survive at a time in my life where I really needed to just be. But survival strategies are never designed to help us live the most vibrant versions of our lives.   

It was painful, going back through the past. And I could feel myself resisting it. It felt cruel and unfair to be reliving and processing painful feelings from things that had happened years before. Things I felt I should’ve moved past.  

But it also humbled me in ways I didn’t know I needed to be humbled. I felt blockages clear that I had been trying to shift for years. And I could feel that I had more access to myself again. I felt the embers stir in my soul. There She was. 

The path to rediscovering Her had been uncomfortable. But it had been necessary. And it taught me something sacred about creativity and my relationship to it; that trying to lock up even part of my vulnerability also stifled my ability to create anything I could be proud of.  

Without that most precious, life-giving, sacred part of me, I could not be my most honest, authentic, true self. And I couldn’t be honest, authentic or truthful in my writing either. Anything I created felt hollow and full of pretence – a lie of omission – and so I hated it. 

The beauty in art, whether its photography, fine arts, music, or the written word, is that it connects us. It speaks to the most broken, dishevelled, exhausted parts of us, but also awakens the parts of us that desire to experience the depths of love, beauty and joy.  

But we cannot speak to those parts in others that so yearn to be seen, held and accepted if we cannot listen to those parts within ourselves.