At one point, I thought I was walking down a road that led me nowhere.
I thought I was lost. Like someone homeless in a familiar place, wandering through streets I could recognize but no longer knew how to navigate.
Every corner looked familiar, yet—nothing felt like home.
I thought every crossroad was another stop. A loooooong stop, because I couldn’t decide which way to go. I would stand there, looking at the possibilities, weighing the consequences, wondering if one wrong turn would take me even farther from where I was supposed to be.
So I waited.
Sometimes, I turned back. Sometimes, I took another road. Sometimes, I convinced myself that moving, regardless of direction, was better than standing still.
I spent so much time trying to find the right way forward that I never considered the possibility that I was looking in the wrong direction.
Until I realized something.
Maybe I wasn’t walking into a road that led me nowhere.
Maybe I was simply walking away from the road that led back.
And perhaps that was why everything felt unfamiliar. Why even the places I once knew seemed strange. Why I kept searching for something I couldn’t quite name.
I had mistaken distance for direction.
I thought I needed to discover somewhere new, when what I really needed was to find my way back to something I had left behind.
Perhaps a part of myself.
Perhaps the things that once made me feel alive. The little things I stopped noticing. The dreams I quietly abandoned because life became too demanding. The person I used to be before I learned to measure every decision against what was expected of me.
We spend so much of our lives trying to get somewhere.
We chase milestones, make plans, take detours, and convince ourselves that every step must bring us closer to a destination. And when it doesn’t, we call ourselves failures. We think we’ve wasted time. We wonder how everyone else seems to know where they’re going while we’re still standing at another crossroads.
But maybe not every journey is about arriving.
Maybe some journeys are about recognizing how far we’ve wandered from ourselves.
And maybe the way back isn’t always a familiar road waiting somewhere behind us. Sometimes, it begins with a decision to stop walking in a direction that no longer feels like ours.
I don’t know if finding our way back is ever as simple as turning around.
Some roads cannot be retraced. Some places no longer exist the way we remember them. Some versions of ourselves are gone, and some doors will never open again.
But perhaps going back doesn’t mean returning to what once was.
Perhaps it means finally choosing not to abandon what remains.
And if you’re standing at a crossroads right now, unsure of which direction to take, I hope you remember this:
You are not necessarily lost just because you haven’t arrived.
And sometimes, the most important direction you can take is the one that brings you closer to yourself.
*image: max kukurudziak / unsplash
