On remembering, removal, and the woman who’s been underneath this whole time
Everyone kept telling me to “find myself” after I left.
Find yourself. Discover who you are. Start your healing journey. Learn to love yourself again. And I know they meant well. I do. But every time someone said it, something in my gut twisted, because the language implied that I’d gone missing. That the woman I used to be had wandered off somewhere and I needed to go searching through yoga retreats and journaling prompts and self-improvement courses until I stumbled across her somewhere outside of myself.
I spent months doing exactly that. Looking outward. Accumulating. Adding things. New routines, new frameworks, new vocabulary for what had happened to me. And all of it was useful, in the way that a map is useful when you’re lost. But that was the problem. I wasn’t lost.
I was buried.
And the difference between those two things changes everything about how you heal.
The Gnostic texts, some of the oldest wisdom writings in human history, say something that stopped me cold the first time I read it: Know yourself, and you will be free.
Not find yourself. Not improve yourself. Not go on a journey to discover yourself in some other country or some other relationship or some other version of your life. Know yourself. As in, the knowledge is already inside you. It didn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t need to be imported from somewhere else. It needs to be uncovered from underneath everything that was piled on top of it.
The Buddha said something similar thousands of years ago: in stillness, truth reveals itself. Not in accumulation. Not in searching. In stillness. The entire point of practice, according to the yoga sutras, isn’t filling the mind with new ideas. It’s stilling the mind. Getting it quiet enough that what was always underneath can finally be heard.
These traditions aren’t saying the same thing by coincidence. They’re pointing at the same truth from different corners of the planet: that awakening isn’t a process of becoming someone new. It’s a process of removing everything that isn’t you until what’s left is the thing that always was.
And what’s left, for every woman who’s ever been swallowed whole by a relationship that demanded she disappear?
Her. The real her. Intact. Unbroken. Not waiting to be found.
Waiting to be remembered.
This is why the “find yourself” narrative, as well-intentioned as it is, accidentally does something dangerous. It confirms the lie he spent years planting: that the real you is gone. That she left. That you’re some hollowed-out shell who needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
That’s his story. Not yours.
You were never empty. You were full. So full of opinions and fire and instinct and desire that it threatened him. So full that he had to spend months, sometimes years, slowly convincing you to pour yourself out. To quiet down. To take up less space. To second-guess every thought before you dared to speak it. To shrink and shrink and shrink until you fit neatly inside the tiny version of you he could manage.
You didn’t lose yourself in that relationship. You were systematically taught to forget. And forgetting isn’t the same as missing.
Think about who you were before him. Not the vague, romanticised version. The specific one.
The woman who said exactly what she was thinking without rehearsing it in her head four times first. The one who made decisions based on what she wanted, not based on how he’d react. Who laughed too loud and didn’t give a shit. Who had friendships that didn’t need his approval. Who wore what she wanted, went where she wanted, thought what she wanted without running it through a filter of is this going to cause a problem tonight.
That woman isn’t missing. She’s right there, underneath every layer of his bullshit that you absorbed and mistook for your own personality. Underneath every “you’re too sensitive” and “you’re overreacting” and “no one else would put up with you” that you heard so many times it started sounding like your own inner voice.
That voice was never yours. You just carried it so long you forgot where it came from.
Here’s what I had to learn the hard way: the other, the woman I was looking for, was never out there. She wasn’t at the end of a healing journey or inside a course or waiting for me in some future version of my life where I’d finally done enough work to deserve her. She was the version of me that existed before they told me who I was allowed to be. Before the scripts. Before the shrinking. Before I learned that being needed was the closest I could get to being loved.
The other is you. The you before the noise.
And you don’t find her by adding more. More recovery meetings, more strategies, more frameworks for understanding what happened. You find her by stripping away. Peeling off every belief about yourself that didn’t originate from you. Every limitation that came from his mouth but took up residence in your mind. Every “I can’t” and “I’m not enough” and “maybe he was right about me” that you’ve been carrying around like it belongs to you.
It doesn’t belong to you. Put it the fuck down.
The ancients didn’t teach awakening as addition. They taught it as removal. You don’t add your way to freedom. You strip away everything that isn’t true until what’s left is the woman who was always there, the one who trusts her gut because it’s never actually been wrong, who knows what she wants and doesn’t apologise for wanting it, who walks into a room without calculating how much space she’s allowed to take up.
She didn’t leave you. You just forgot. Not on purpose. Not because you’re weak. Because survival demanded it. Because loving him required you to forget her, and you chose survival in the only way you knew how.
But you’re not in survival mode anymore.
You don’t need a massive reinvention. You need a reunion. Not with some idealised future self you haven’t built yet. With the woman who was buried alive under someone else’s story about who you were supposed to be.
The Gnostic writers knew it. The Buddha knew it. Every ancient tradition that’s ever asked a human being to sit still and look inward knew it: what you’re searching for isn’t somewhere you haven’t been. It’s somewhere you haven’t been still enough to hear.
Who was I before they told me who I was allowed to be?
That question isn’t the beginning of a journey outward. It’s the beginning of a homecoming. And the woman you find when you finally answer it honestly isn’t someone you need to become.
She’s someone you need to remember.
Choose all,
xoxo Viktoria
P.S. If “find yourself” has always felt slightly off to you, trust that. Your gut isn’t confused. You don’t need to go searching for someone who never left. You just need to get quiet enough to hear her again. She’s been trying to get your attention for years. The fact that you’re reading this? That’s her. Already louder than the voice that buried her.
