When you don’t know who you are anymore.
I’ve been posting about my healing journey for almost a year now, and one of the questions I keep getting is this: How did you reinvent yourself when you didn’t even know who you were anymore?
The answer is much simpler than it sounds.
Learning how to reinvent yourself doesn’t start with a personality overhaul or a dramatic life reset. It starts with making intentional choices.
What do you want to stand for?
What do you want to do?
What do you want to sound like in the world?
I’m going to walk you through the exact exercises I used in the hospital to begin reinventing myself. But first, I want you to know this: it’s okay if this feels hard. I went through a second breakdown when I started this process, because I realized that about 98% of who I was had been written by other people.
1. Start With Your Values
I literally just had the nurses Google a list of personal values for me and print it out. Then I went through that list with some highlighters and decided what mattered to me MOST, A LOT, or NOT AT ALL.
After that, I rewrote the list without the items that didn’t matter. Then I went through it again with more highlighters to narrow it down to the final list of what actually mattered to me. I’ll share my values page from that very journal I started in the hospital.
This final list of values followed me through multiple journals over the course of the last year. I would rewrite it into the front pages of every new journal I got and reference it whenever I needed to remember who I was.
A lot of people think they need to have some inherent, untouched knowledge of self and just navigate from there. But there are so many things that can overwrite that. For me, it was people-pleasing and trauma.
So I had to decide who I wanted to be—and then make myself reminders for as long as I needed, until I rebuilt that sense of self again.
2. Choose a Mission Statement (Even If It’s Hard)
Next, you’re going to pick a mission statement. This is the core of who your new self will be.
You want to make it something you can reference; something that tells you how you want to respond to situations, what you want to stand for, and what kind of person you want to be. This may change as time goes on, and that’s normal.
That breakdown I mentioned earlier? It was around figuring this out.
I was so disturbed by not being able to come up with something easily that it jarred all my progress to a halt. I had to stop and figure out why I couldn’t come up with a mission statement at all.
What I ended up doing was making lists of all the aspects of who I was, what I loved, and the things I did. Then I had to pull out of that the parts I actually wanted to keep. It didn’t matter if some of those things had someone else’s name on them—I just needed to know that I wanted them.
This step may not be necessary for everyone. But if you’re someone who’s always been told what to think, what to feel, how to respond—and you’ve been punished, bullied, or worn down for getting it “wrong”—this step is how you reclaim yourself.
Once you can see everything in front of you that you want to keep, writing that mission statement becomes a lot easier.
3. Honor the Person You’re Becoming
The last thing you want to do after all this work is to honor this new version of you.
For many of us, we’ve been taught that spending too much energy on ourselves makes us vain. But that’s not true. You’re allowed to love yourself and who you are becoming.
What I did was build a journal that was just about me.
I had a collage page titled “Who is Del Rey?” and wrote random facts about myself in it. I had a page for my values, my mission statement, and quotes that I loved. I recorded the books I read and my thoughts about them. I had a page for the things I loved about myself—and the first thing I wrote down was my shoulders.
I recorded everything that celebrated who I was and reminded me that I could love that person.
And I referenced that journal whenever I needed that reminder.
(Which was a lot.)
A Gentle Truth About Reinventing Yourself
If you take nothing else from this, I want you to hear this: reinventing yourself isn’t about becoming someone unrecognizable.
It’s about choosing yourself—on purpose, over and over again.
It can feel scary. It can feel huge and heavy and like you’re standing at the edge of something you don’t know how to cross. But in practice, it’s made of small, ordinary choices that slowly add up to a life that finally feels like it belongs to you.
You don’t have to do this perfectly. You don’t have to have all the answers today.
You just have to start asking yourself better questions and be brave enough to listen to the answers.
What do you want to stand for?
What do you want to be doing?
What do you want to be known for?
And maybe the most important one:
Who do you want to become when no one else is writing the story for you anymore?
Leave a Reply