The Identity Crisis in Awakening

In December of 2016, I sat on my couch uncomfortably approaching 41 weeks of pregnancy, and said out loud (to witnesses):

“I can’t wait for the baby to get here so everything can just go back to normal.”

Now, to be fair, I was uncomfortable (and had been for months).

I wanted to eat soft cheese again.

And, this was my first kid.

Still, maybe I should’ve had a little more foresight.

But I couldn’t have truly known that normal was dead and buried. That when I crossed into motherhood it was going to change me in ways that would both bring me to my knees, and bring me more strength and empowerment than I’d ever known.

Motherhood was a portal.

That portal opened with an emergency c-section, followed by a colicky baby that couldn’t be soothed. It was the uncomfortable antidote to my perfectionist ways. Nothing was going how I planned and everything felt like chaos.

I was tired and often alone. There was no loud commute to the office, no colleagues to chit chat with, no emails to respond to.. no distractions.

The perfection that had been driving my life was being taken over by uncertainty and unpredictability.

All the badges I wore that determined my value were now on hold.

I felt lost, insecure, and a new feeling: angry.

I started questioning my life up until that point. Why had I felt powerless and let people walk all over me?

Why couldn’t I say what I needed?

Why do I meet my body with such hatred?

Who am I performing for?

One by one I began to pull up everything I had squished down and put out of sight. Looking at my life from this angle, it seemed to be an endless search for approval and acceptance. I was silencing myself and shrinking myself and I didn’t feel like I could breathe anymore.

I needed to find me –the real me.

The Identity Crisis of Awakening

Maybe that’s the real identity crisis that comes with motherhood and awakening. Not that we lose ourselves, but that we get to let go of all the false versions of us and finally meet our true self.

The masks we were hiding behind start to come off as we don’t want to play those roles any more. We don’t want to perform.

We can’t.

All those versions of us were versions we created to survive, to adapt, to fit in. But they don’t quite fit anymore and we find it harder and harder to move against ourselves.

After the intense self-reflection that comes with awakening, after the inevitable healing that takes place along with that, we find it difficult to put back on those masks.

But who are we then?

It can be a destabilizing experience, but it all moves us closer to our soul, to our hearts knowing, and away from the rigidity of an identity.

The Portals of Uncertainty

So many things in our lives can ask us to pause, to look differently, to change course. Moments like the death of a loved one, birth, divorce, illness. These events open us to allow us to hear our Soul’s call in a way we hadn’t been able to hear it before.

They crack the foundation of who we thought we were.

These portals shake up everything and can be wildly disorienting. They will often require a death of the beliefs we held and the patterns we blindly followed without realizing it.

And after we’ve walked through those portals, they change us.

• We go through a lot of self-reflection and confronting old stuff

• We start to reassess what matters to us

• We start to show up for ourselves and learn to listen to ourselves

• We begin to choose differently

But it’s not all hard.

Following the disorienting part is usually a process of opening up deeper to our intuitive and spiritual abilities. A process of learning to trust ourselves more and honor ourselves in ways we’ve never done before.

And that’s the real magic.

P.S. What I’ve learned since that day on the couch is that there is no such thing as normal.

If you are going through spiritual awakening and the identity crisis that comes with it, check out my very first book You Already Know, coming out in July.