feeling lost
When it's a theme in your life, not a fleeting moment.
I open my eyes to a ceiling I’ve never seen before.
Blurry figures rush around me. Why am I on the floor?
Pure instinct— I push myself up onto my elbows, the hard floor biting into my skin.
No, they say, drawing me back to the ground. The doctor comes into focus, the silver lights above her winking too bright, too searing. Her mouth warps around words I can’t make out.
It all comes back. The blood draw. The lightheadedness. My head throbs, feels raw and spinning. My neck is stiff where it wasn’t.
When do you want to come in for your next appointment the last words before the floor rushed up to meet me.
They walk me, arm-in-arm, to one of those beds with scratchy paper. Someone needs to pick me up, or the ambulance needs to take me to the emergency room. It could be a concussion or internal bleeding. Who knows?
I can’t. A river streaming down my face. How much would that even cost?
That’s not important right now, they say.
No one can come get me. They’re all at work, or out of town.
Family too far away. Friends working. Everyone just distant enough to make me feel my isolation as a sharp blade.
I am alone. Wishing someone was here. Blaming myself for being so damned sensitive to blood draws. For not insisting that I sit down for longer. Passing out on the hard floor. Being a blubbering inconvenience. They call, of course.
Later, as I’m waiting to get my scan at the hospital, it all hits me.
The tears were from the shock, yes. But even more, the hit of loneliness on the floor of the doctor’s office. The vulnerability among strangers. The solitude, the waiting.
The mundane events — getting blood drawn, passing out, hitting my head, going to the emergency room, getting the all okay, being picked up by a friend, an ambulance ride that only cost $200 when it could have been $34,000 — don’t look like much.
At most, the inconvenience of a day, plus a few for recovery. It’s the external arc, not the internal struggle.
Experiences have a way of pointing us to feelings, waving at truths we’ve only guessed at. Like literature, where characters don’t just experience the plot of their lives— we feel them ripple across consciousnessness and into identity.
From the point of view perspective of my own life, again and again, my experiences (even the boring ones) keep matching me with a feeling of being lost, a transitional and transformative white space that keeps widening. A labyrinth I wander looking for the center.
Maybe it’s a theme I’m looking for, so everything that happens to me lately confirms it. When I boarded the 9:09 northbound instead of the 9:14 southbound to Cambridge, I didn’t only regret the mistake— I questioned the whole journey.
I texted my husband, “This feels like everything in my life right now.”
Like I keep boarding a train in the wrong direction and bouncing between stations. Like I make plans and they fall apart. Like my sense of self keeps getting questioned by the challenges thrown my way. My internal arc of feeling lost matched to an external experience.
We all have these moments— regularly. But do you ever get the sense when it’s a theme in your life, and not just a fleeting moment?
Rebecca Solnit’s The Field Guide to Getting Lost was my early introduction to the idea that being lost is cyclical. You can never quite outgrow it, flee from it, or release it. Sometimes, being lost simply finds you.
In my first year of college, it was the assignment I didn’t fully appreciate (or understand). Not knowing Solnit’s cultural influence (this was before Men Explain Things to Me), I read along in my sister’s flagged and annotated copy. We questioned the highbrow turns of phrase, the meandering prose, the way she wandered between topics.
My 19-year-old self didn’t know what to make of passages like this one:
“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake.
Now I understand ‘lost’ in this exact way. The “unfamilar appearing” that happens when you can point on a map and see where you are.
You can look back as if you are in that rear-facing seat on the train and see cliffs falling away, the landscape changing, gloves and books and names flying. You know what happened. You see the events clearly.
What feels unfamiliar and undefined is why and for how long. The force-change of shedding skin you didn’t know you were ready to lose. The ruts and rock bottoms. The magic darks, seven year cycles, saturn returning, whatever we call it.
It’s the knowing that good things come from uncomfortable moments, only feeling completely at peace with them after we know we’re safely out.
It’s realizing we’ll never get to a point in life where we’ve ‘made it’ and have everything ‘figured out.’
It’s living in the question instead of the answer. Enjoying the adventure anyway.
It’s leaving your door open. Believing in impossible things.
“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.” — Rebecca Solnit