"When another person's needs become total, the self you can no longer find may not be lost so much as no longer allowed."
If this resonates with you, what follows may help you see something about yourself.
SeekerI keep waiting to feel like myself again. He’s fourteen months now. Everyone said it comes back. It hasn’t. I look in the mirror and I don’t know who that is, and that sounds dramatic, I know it does.
GuideIt doesn’t sound dramatic to me. What did “myself” used to be, before?
SeekerI don’t know. Someone who read things. Who had opinions about things that weren’t sleep schedules. I ran a whole team at work. Now I feel like a service.
SeekerYeah. That came out wrong. I love him. I’d do it all again. It’s just, everything routes through him now. Everything. And that’s normal, that’s what you sign up for, so I don’t know why I’m even here.
GuideYou said everything routes through him like it was an accusation and then you took it back in the same breath.
SeekerBecause I don’t get to complain. He didn’t ask to be born. I chose this.
GuideCan I ask about a small thing? Is there something ordinary you used to do that you can’t anymore, that you actually miss?
SeekerThis is stupid. Coffee. Just, going to get a coffee. Sitting there for twenty minutes with nobody needing anything from me. I used to hate people who talked about self-care and now I would, I don’t know.
SeekerI’d cry over a coffee I can’t drink alone. See, this is what I mean. There’s nothing there anymore. It’s just this small resentful person over a cup of coffee.
GuideI don’t hear resentment when you say it. I hear grief. Those aren’t the same.
SeekerIt can’t be grief. Nothing died. I have this beautiful kid.
GuideSomething can be gone without anyone dying. You keep folding it back into whether you love him, like the second you feel the loss you have to prove you’re still a good mother.
SeekerBecause if I say I miss my old life, what does that make me. It means I want him gone. I don’t.
GuideI don’t think those are the same either. Missing the coffee isn’t wanting him gone. But you can’t seem to let the missing just exist by itself.
SeekerNo. I can’t. If I let it sit there it feels like I’m choosing it over him.
GuideWhat if the self you’re looking for isn’t gone? What if you just stopped being allowed to want anything for her?
SeekerI don’t know what to do with that.
GuideYou don’t have to do anything with it yet.
SeekerI keep saying to myself she wandered off. But I know exactly where she is. I put her down somewhere the day he came home and I haven’t let myself go back for her.
SeekerAnd I still don’t know if I’m allowed to.
If wanting something for yourself did not mean loving them less, what is the first thing you would let yourself want back?
What actually shiftedBecoming a parent can make the old self feel erased, but often it has been set aside rather than lost. When another's needs become total, one's own wanting can start to feel illegitimate, even disloyal. For some, the disorientation is grief for a self that is still there but no longer permitted, not proof of loving the child less.
Keeping the direction yoursIf you read back the conversation: notice where the guide quietly became the one who knows — naming things, settling them. That feels normal because it happens so often. It's also where your own sense of direction can go quiet. SelfChatter adds a second voice that just makes those moments visible, so the direction stays yours.