WHAT WAS NEVER LOST

—A Personal Reflection; Confession of sorts

I have been thinking a lot lately about the versions of ourselves people become attached to.

The ones they first encounter.
The ones they understand most easily.
The ones that make them feel certain about who we are.

And I think somewhere along the way, I quietly began fearing what would happen if I no longer fit entirely inside that version of myself anymore.

Not because I wanted to become someone unrecognizable.
But because becoming itself sometimes asks us to loosen our grip on identities that once kept us safe.

A few days ago, I sat in a corner coffee shop in Poblacion Makati, Philippines, with friends I have known through different stages of our spiritual and creative lives.

A Table of Cards

Old conversations returning in new forms. Quiet realizations passing between people who have all become different versions of themselves since the last time fate placed them in the same room.

One is learning how to hold the many different hats her path now asks of her. Another is trying to find her way back to hers. And somewhere in between both of their stories, I found myself realizing how deeply I have been sitting inside my own uncertainty too.

Not just creatively.
But personally.

There is a strange grief that comes with no longer knowing whether you are still standing inside the life people once trusted you for.

And maybe even stranger still is the fear that changing too much might make that trust disappear entirely.

Group of Three Girls — Egon Schiele

Three figures suspended between girlhood, grief, becoming, and survival. Schiele paints not unity, but proximity — the strange intimacy of people carrying different versions of uncertainty beside one another.

During that conversation, something unexpectedly returned to me.

Years ago, I gave one of my friends a reading. And only recently did we both realize how much one particular message related to this reading, had quietly followed her through the years:

amor fati.

The love of one’s fate.

Not because fate is always gentle.
Not because every path is easy.
But because there comes a point where resisting your own becoming becomes far more painful than allowing yourself to change.

And perhaps that realization returned to me when I needed it most too.

Because I think I have spent so much time fearing stagnation, fearing irrelevance, fearing distance, fearing becoming someone unfamiliar, that I forgot something much quieter underneath all of it:

that uncertainty does not erase us.

That evolution does not invalidate who we once were.

That even after long seasons of silence, grief, exhaustion, confusion, reinvention, or emotional distance from ourselves, something beneath all of it continues to remain intact.

Not unchanged.

But undiminished.

“What Was Never Lost” emerged somewhere from within that realization.

Not as certainty.
Not as confidence.
Not as arrival.

But as remembrance.

And perhaps loving one’s fate also means trusting that even the versions of ourselves we cannot fully recognize yet are still worthy of becoming.