Between Selves

Stuck in No Man’s Land Between Breakdown and Reformation

I used to play a good game. It feels now as though that person has turned their back on me, and I can no longer rely on them to carry me to the end.

I had been overextended for years, socially calibrated and performing my idea of the ideal. I was a high functioning over performer who kept up appearances and tightly regulated my emotions through habit and suppression. But my coping mechanisms were failing me, and I began sabotaging the very stage I had spent my life performing on. Until I couldn’t. When the collapse came, that person could never return. My body would no longer allow the lie to continue. I wanted a moment to reset, but instead I found myself trapped in an update that could not roll back to the old operating system. All the masking had been nothing more than unsustainable survival strategies masquerading as traits.

The landscape of psychological flora, all the textures and colours, slid away as if washed out by a flood, leaving bare rock beneath. A whole mountain stripped back to its core, its future shape not yet defined by new growth. That will require time.

I did not recognise who lay exposed underneath. I could only see the crumbled remains of the self I had carried for so long.

After the collapse I could no longer pretend. That resource had drained away. If a friend called, I met them with tears and an inability to speak. The numbing pretence was gone, replaced by a hyper honesty I had no filters for. I could not force anything. Not motivation, not patience, not performance, not the old social face.

There are moments when I walk into the kitchen and feel as though I have entered someone else’s life. The room looks familiar but not coherent, as if I am visiting a place I used to know. I stand there with the sense that my memory has gaps, and I must retrace how I ended up here.

Where I once saw breakdown as failure, I now see it as a levelling. A demolition back to the foundation the self needed in order to rise again.

Routines began to slip from conscious thought. I would be mid-task and suddenly unable to remember what step I was on. Had I added salt. Was I checking something. Was I pacing the room aimlessly or scrolling through a mental list. It felt as though the frames of my life were skipping, small pockets of time tumbling out of existence.

My tolerance evaporated. Irritability spiked.

Small tasks became monumental.

The old personality structure crumbled.

What feels like a more emotional me is simply an unarmoured me. Unfiltered by pressure, perfectionism, or the need to hold the line for other people’s comfort.

The sense of losing myself is not disappearance but the arrival of someone else. Someone unfamiliar perhaps, but someone who feels more aligned at a deeper level.

It is disorientating. Where did I go, and who has shown up instead. What is happening here. Untethered from the old me, I am following this new presence through low visibility. They do not tell me where we are going, but I have no choice except to follow.

When life can no longer distract you, it becomes a form of self enquiry. Emotions sharpen, scraping against every movement. The rawness magnifies small things. Sadness becomes a heavy yet warming cloak.

I miss the old me who could cope, who could perform on demand, who could endure. But it is the passing of someone who had been unwell for a long time, and there is relief in letting them go. They no longer need to suffer.

Now I live in the no man’s land between who I was and who I might become, sitting with the pieces of identity reconstruction. I am resting on a liminal plateau halfway up life’s climb. You cannot go back the way you came. You can only move up the next ridge.

This mutant feeling is the moment between selves. I became stuck between the old me and the new me, a disfigured blend of both, with neither able to take the reins. The old self was no longer available. The new one had not yet formed.

The mutant self is not deformity but exposure. A vantage point. A place to pause and study the terrain I have crossed, and consider where I might go next. Suspended in transit, I am cautious of rushing up the wrong path.

I catch glimpses of clarity and flashes of insight, but stable ground is still beyond reach. I may need to retrace a few steps to find a better route upward.

How sad to spend so much of life as the wrong version of yourself. I am mourning the familiarity, a grief for the competence and certainty I once held.

I have to orient myself towards a more honest emergence. To understand that I am not lost, only unfinished. I must shape a way forwards, because there is no return journey. Going back would be like growing older in order to visit your younger self.

I have to trust the new me knows the way, because I no longer do.