Have you ever been lost? I mean lost mentally and emotionally? Lost direction in your life, your purpose?

Did it occur to you when you wake up one day in the morning and you wonder: “What the hell is going on?” “What the hell I was doing for the last 6 months, a year, 5 years?”, “Why I was doing it?” And you don’t know the answer for any of these questions. There is nothing wrong with your memory, you remember it all, but it all seems not right anymore, not familiar to you. You start losing the grip of who you are and what you do.

When Everything Is Meaningless…

Your job doesn’t excite you anymore. After a while you find it hard to do your job, it is becoming a burden on your shoulders that turns heavier every single day. The job that you were so good at and so interested in! You ask yourself: “How come this happened?” In a fracture of a second (it seems like) you turned from being a strong passionate and single-minded character to demotivated whining helpless piece of shit, who doesn’t know what to do.

Like a writer that was used to a routine of writing 3000 words a day, finds it hard to glue few sentences together, like an able football player who starts to lose the ball, miss all the time, does ridiculous mistakes on the field. Or in the office, you drop stationary, you stare at the screen for minutes without understanding what’s on it. You drink a lot coffee, and it seems the more you drink, the more you want to sleep. You are working in autopilot mode. All. The. Time. You start to question your every move and word, you question your clear judgment.

Things that usually made you feel happy and fulfilled stopped bringing you any joy in your life. That nice walk that you usually did on Sunday afternoons in the park - you don’t care about it anymore. Tuesday dinner with your friends - you might not even pick up the phone when they call you. The flower on the window that made you smile in the morning - it’s already dead because you didn’t water it for three weeks. Simple joys in life, are not joys anymore, but tasteless distractions…

Slowly you find it hard getting asleep at nights, you wake up late all the time and tired no matter how many hours you have actually slept. In the mornings there is no force on Earth that can make you stand up from the bed, sometimes you stay there for a few hours. You procrastinate more and more. You find it hard to concentrate on one task, you lose your focus all the time, your mind wanders and you can’t keep up. Multitasking - you don’t even know what it is anymore.

Sometimes you forget to eat, but you don’t care, you are too lazy to get your butt up and go to the shop. You used to like cooking at home, but now you rather get a ready-meal, heat it up in a microwave, and carelessly stuff your stomach with this poison. You stop taking care of your health and body.

On your days off you have no clue what to do with your free time. You just lay on your bed and gaze into the ceiling, trying to perceive the emptiness that has nested deeply inside of you. The rest of the day you try to fill it with some useless activities like watching Netflix all day long, web-surfing without any particular purpose and ending up having your brain cooked because of the information overload (no wonder you find it hard to fall asleep).

When You Keep Going Down The Spiral…

You might start using stimuli to fill up the gaping void inside to prevent it from swallowing you entirely. You try alcohol, drugs, anything just to avoid the problem, because you became afraid of even thinking about the fact that you are lost. You will just keep piling up the excuses not to address the issue. Fear like a blooming flower grows in you heart and roots it in. And you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

The doubt crawls inside…what if, just what IF, you are getting out of your mind… “Am I depressed?” becomes the question of the day… You don’t share it with anybody - you are afraid that people will see you as weak. “Am I weak?” you ask yourself, and you struggle to give a negative answer, because a voice inside of you tells “Look at yourself! A wreck! What are you but a failure?”

Your friends and relatives have noticed a change long ago but you blindly keep pretending that everything is fine.  At this point, it is getting very hard to escape from the problem, because by trying to avoid it, you made it unavoidable.

Negative Self Talk Is A Viscous Circle

The more you try to avoid it, the worse it becomes and you get more and more depressed…

So you start complaining - WHY?! Why it happened to me?! Why can’t I be normal like everybody else?!

If you got to this point - I have got some good news for you. Everybody are lost exactly like you are, they simply don’t know that yet. Overall there are 3 types of people:

1. Those who are lost and unaware of it.
2. Lost and aware of it.
3. Not lost. These are the people that know exactly what they are doing and most importantly they know their WHY.

If you recognised yourself in some of the paragraphs above - you are the second type. Lost and aware of it. You have to admit that you already have an advantage - you are one step ahead of the rest who are oblivious to the fact that are wondering nowhere (to the grave actually, tip-toeing)!

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke ZarathustraOne must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

(Read this book - Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is not an easy read. Especially if you are like myself - not native English speaker. But as my dear friend Dimitry said to me once: “You have to read difficult books that will revolutionise your mind, there is no sense in reading books that will barely teach you anything that you don’t know already”.)

The moment when you are consciously aware of your lost state is critical, as you have only two options here what to do about it.

1. Give up. Stay where you are. Eventually, your mind will find enough excuses to rationalise your lost state. This is a steady road back to square one - lost and unaware.
2. “Collect all your willpower in a fist” (we say that in Russian), work to rediscover yourself and do not stop until you get back on track with your life.

You can give up, and continue the self-destructive process of drowning in depression - that’s the easy way out…OR, you can stand up, look in the mirror and say “IT’S ENOUGH!”. Say to yourself out loud: “I am not going to bend! I am not going to break! I can handle this! I will find the way out! I will redefine myself! I will write my own story!” You should feel like this guy a moment after:

That’s what happened to me once…

Most people are not fed up enough with their problems. They may seem frustrated beyond belief. I’ve had people with obsessive-compulsive disorder whose every moment, every morning, noon, and night, was consumed with rituals designed to find comfort. They had to lock and unlock the door fifteen times and wash their hands a thousand times a day, but they became so frustrated that they finally said, “Enough is enough. I’m just not doing this anymore.” This is the moment people really change themselves.

Excerpt from “Get The Life You Want” by Richard Bandler (co-creator of NLP, along with John Grinder)

Shortly after I have finished the book…

Sunday, January 12, 2014 at 13.50 PM. I opened the Word document and started with “ENOUGH!”. I have written about 2000 words in one go, almost non-stop. Whatever was in my head I let the digital ink capture it. I have written about my past, about my past aims and ambitions and how all of them became meaningless. I re-read that text probably five times after. And finally… I felt liberated, a rock has fallen off my shoulders. I could breathe easily again. I relaxed. I have admitted to myself that the life I was living is not my life, it’s just not me…

I have written in my previous post how important it is to self-reflect and keep noting down your thoughts. This stuff is valuable. (I still have this file I mentioned above - besides of learning from it, it’s also super fun to re-read it a few years later.

That day I became aware that I am lost…but that made me frustrated even more. I didn’t know how it feels to be lost up until then.

Months later, I understood that all this happened for a reason and I have been given a chance to redesign my life:

Losing yourself in life, could be one of the most liberating experiences you can have in a lifetime.

I realised that I was SUPPOSED to lose myself if I ever wished to find what is truly my mission on this planet. I think, it can happen with everybody at any point in life, regardless of the age, education, profession, location. It doesn’t matter how skilled or talented you are - there will be a time when everything will go wrong and you will get lost.

Do Not Resist It - Embrace It Instead

By embracing it you accept the opportunity to re-evaluate yourself on everything that you have done before, everything that you are doing right now and planning on doing in the future. This will strengthen your character. This will be a new challenge: to find out the way out of nowhere. This is the time to go within yourself and dig down to your very core, with an attempt to re-discover yourself.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

- Aristotle

Losing yourself is not the end, it is a chance for a new beginning. It is an offer to look from a completely new perspective at your entire life. Most people don’t even realise that they are lost, they keep doing what they did before and they are miserable! They don’t question themselves: “Why I do what I do? What is my purpose?”. You did! You are already ahead - keep going! Find what it is you want and go after it with all your heart!

Finding your calling in life is not an easy task. It is hard work. It is a journey of self-exploration that starts within. Before discovering who you want to become you first have to discover who you are.

And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?

- Rumi