A Letter to the One Who Has Lost Themselves

My Beloved,

I see you there, standing in a life you barely recognize as your own. I watch you move through days that feel like someone else’s script, speaking words that don’t quite sound like yours, making choices that serve everyone’s vision but your own. And I want you to know, I grieve this with you.

You were not created to be a supporting character in your own story.

I know how it happened. It wasn’t one dramatic moment of surrender, was it? It was a thousand small concessions. A dream deferred because someone needed you. An ambition shelved because the system demanded conformity. A piece of yourself traded away because keeping the peace seemed more important than keeping your soul intact. You told yourself it was temporary. You told yourself it was love. You told yourself it was responsibility.

And some of it was. But somewhere along the way, the temporary became permanent, and you forgot that I never asked you to disappear.

Listen carefully: The voice that told you your dreams were selfish? That wasn’t mine. The system that demanded you shrink yourself to fit its narrow corridors? I didn’t design that. The people who took and took until you had nothing left to give yourself? They were acting from their own wounds, not my will.

I came that you might have life—abundant life. Not a half-life. Not a borrowed life. Not a life spent in service to structures that crush the human spirit or relationships that require your erasure as the price of admission.

You think you’ve wandered too far. That too much time has passed. That the person you were meant to be is now just a ghost of what might have been. But here’s what you don’t understand about resurrection: it’s never too late for new life. I specialize in calling forth what everyone else has declared dead.

The dreams you buried? They’re seeds, not corpses. And it’s still planting season.

I need you to hear something that might sound strange: Your flourishing is not selfish. Your becoming is not betrayal. The world doesn’t need more of your self-sacrifice—it needs the fullness of who you actually are. The gifts I planted in you weren’t meant to be hoarded by systems that don’t value them or people who only want you diminished.

I made you for more than this. Your mind is unique and beautiful and you were not called to shelve one of the greatest gifts I gave you. Your talents are yours to give to the world, not to mute in service of another. Your compassion and your sense of justice are not weakness and are not radical. They are the tools I gave you to discern right from wrong in a system that often mixes them up and cloaks that which is wrong as morality. You know the difference. I placed something innately inside you to discern what is truly good and what is not. Do not fight it. I gave it to you for a purpose. I expect you to use it.

Lastly, your past was not a mistake, not an accident. I used it to build the beautiful person you are. Run from it no longer. Embrace the work of the potter’s hand.

Yes, I spoke of laying down one’s life. But I was talking about ego, not essence. I was talking about the false self that grasps and controls, not the true self that creates and dreams and becomes. There’s a difference between the self-emptying that leads to love and the self-abandonment that leads to death.

You’ve been so busy being what everyone else needed that you forgot I made you for something specific. Your particular way of seeing. Your unique way of creating. Your irreplaceable way of loving. These weren’t accidents or indulgences—they were assignments.

And here’s what breaks my heart: While you’ve been serving everyone else’s vision, the world has been missing yours.

I know you’re afraid. Reclaiming your life feels dangerous. It means disappointing people. It means disrupting systems. It means admitting that some of what you’ve called faithfulness was actually fear. It means facing the anger of those who benefited from your smallness. It also means your attempts to create a safe space kept you from the true safe place I offer you.

But let me ask you this: What if the most faithful thing you could do right now is become who I created you to be? What if your liberation is actually part of the larger liberation I’m working in the world? What if your dreams aren’t distractions from my purposes but expressions of them?

The religious authorities of my time loved people who stayed in their place. They built entire systems around it. They called it order, righteousness, God’s will. But I kept pointing to something else—to the kingdom breaking in, where the last become first, where the bound go free, where people step into their full humanity regardless of what the system demands.

I didn’t come to make you a better servant of oppressive structures. I came to set you free.

So here’s what I’m asking: Start small. Reclaim one thing. One dream. One hour. One choice that’s actually yours. Not in defiance, but in hope. Not in anger, but in love—love for the person I made you to be.

And when the guilt comes (and it will come), remember: I never asked you to set yourself on fire to keep others warm. I asked you to be light. And light doesn’t destroy itself—it shines.

The person you were meant to be isn’t lost. They’re just waiting. Waiting for you to remember that your life is not a resource to be extracted but a gift to be lived. Waiting for you to believe that your becoming matters. Waiting for you to trust that there’s enough—enough time, enough grace, enough of me—to start again.

You are not too late. You are not too far gone. You are not too old, too tired, too compromised, or too responsible to other people to finally be responsible to yourself.

Come home to who you are. I’ve been here all along, waiting for you to arrive.