Do I wanna be Lost or Found?

There are mornings I wake up with sunlight bruising its way through my curtains, and I stay there, half awake, wondering if I’m a real person or just a collection of random choices filled with memories I’m supposed to forget.

The world is quite sharp in its definitions. Found is good, lost is bad, as simple as that. Maybe being found means being known, to the world, or at least to the people around you. But I’m not sure if I believe in that anymore. I do not know if I wanna be known to others when I don’t even know who I am, when I’m trying so hard to find the lost me.

However, I find a strange romance in being lost.

Not the panicked kind of lost where you drop your phone in an unknown city in the foreign land; it’s rather the kind where you’re drifting slowly with the wind, where the signs of universe make more sense to you than any people speaking with clear words. Where you pass by a departmental store and forget what you were supposed to buy. Or where you look in the mirror and find someone else’s echo. The kind that sits with you in the cafés, watching people pass by, time slipping through your fingers, and you lost in them for hours.

There is in fact a strange intimacy in being lost, isn’t there?

It’s like standing at the edge of yourself and realizing you don’t even know your outline. There’s grief in that. But there’s also freedom in not knowing who you are. Because if I don’t know myself, I can become anyone. Someone new. Someone the world has not seen yet, and will never see again.

I can do anything, be anyone and have anything I want. I can finally be free from the expectations of the world, fall out of every role I’ve ever been handed: a daughter, a friend, an overachiever, a lover. There have been times I’ve craved it, to shed expectations of people like an old skin, to dissolve into the unknown without needing to explain why, to let the wind carry me somewhere no one would find me, somewhere nameless, somewhere unknown in the map.

But then, somewhere in all that drifting, I would want someone to knock on my door and ask me to come home. I would want to be found. By someone, anyone. And unravel parts of me that haven’t been discovered yet.

Not in the fairytale way. Not saved or rescued. Just recognized, understood and known.

There is something devastatingly tender about being found. To let someone touch the truth of you without asking them to. To be seen not despite your flaws, but through them. But it’s also terrifying. Because what if they see and leave anyway? What if they hold your heart and then drop it? What if being found only makes the emptiness more vivid when it returns?

Still, I’ve learned that being found isn't always about someone else. 

Being found can mean walking home barefoot at dawn and realizing you don’t hate the sound of your own footsteps anymore. It can mean looking at your old journals and forgiving the version of you who begged to be noticed. It can mean standing in front of the mirror, not smiling, not performing, just existing, and thinking, So this is who I’ve been all along.

I used to believe that life was a path: linear, predictable, paved with milestones. But now I think it’s more like a labyrinth. Noisy, circular, filled with echoes. We keep taking wrong turns thinking they’re right. We fall in love with ideas instead of people. We lose ourselves in noise. We try to seek validation from the ones we wouldn’t take advice from.

But one day, I realized I wasn’t searching for someone else to find me. I was looking for me. Sometimes, home is a person, not a place and maybe that person had been me all along.

As the saying goes, “You don’t really know who you are until you’ve been someone else and come back.”

I've found myself, not in the version I’d painted for others, but in the quiet truth underneath all the noise. The one who laughed with her whole chest. The one who cried at poems. The one who loved getting lost in the woods, notebook in hand, writing poems no one would read, singing songs no one would listen to and leaving stardust no one would admire, except the universe. The one who didn’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore, and the one who’s not afraid of trying everything. 

And, in the end, I've realized, I was lost just to be found.