The Art of Getting Lost to Find Yourself

If I had a penny for every time I went against sound advice, I’d have enough to defy even more advice, quit my job(s), and live on a remote island somewhere in the Pacific.

In my twenties, particularly my early twenties, life felt hollow and heavy all at once. I was desperate for a life that didn’t look like the one I was living. And with that desperation came an F-it attitude that both frightened and freed me. When you feel like you have nothing to lost, you take risks. What’s the worst that could happen? I’d ask myself. And before my mind could conjure up an answer, I’d get up and find a distraction.

My life looked like a mess of short-sighted decisions. I went all-in on a degree that made people roll their eyes and predict a jobless future for me. For three years, I was asked “but what will you actually do once you graduate.” I didn’t have an answer. I jumped into jobs that felt random at best, and reckless in reality. From writing articles engineered never to be read, to curating Arabic playlists in dialects I couldn’t understand, my choices raised eyebrows everywhere I went.

I even bet on a relationship with a man whose world was light-years away from mine—a world of customs and values that clashed with my own in every way. My closest friends called me an idiot, warning that I was setting myself up for heartbreak. But to me, his unfamiliarity drew me in and made me feel alive. On the outside, I might’ve looked reckless, even stubborn. But the truth is, those decisions were my lifelines. That so-called “chaos” was my survival.

Our society’s obsession with what people say and think about us can often make us stand in the way of our own integral life experiences. The version of myself I was supposed to be—the one that wouldn’t make people talk— felt suffocating. And the truth is, even if you spend your whole life living by the rule book, they’ll still talk.

The only way I knew to feel alive was to take risks and make as many mistakes as I could—meaningful, scary, sometimes illogical ones. Choices that would have people talking. But I learned to say yes to things that frightened me, to throw myself into the unknown, and trust that if I jumped, something would catch me. Sometimes I crashed and burned, but every now and then, I soared. And those leaps became the biggest blessings of my life.

But now, at the edge of thirty, I’ll admit: that old courage feels distant, even buried. A part of me craves that raw, reckless courage I once had, the part of me that was willing to lose everything to find myself. I know Twenty-Three-Year-Old Me is still in there somewhere, pushing me to face down my fears and just take the leap. She’s whispering, If it doesn’t work out, at least we can say we tried. We can say we lived.

Because sometimes getting lost is the only way to find out where we truly belong.