Why Healing Feels So Lonely

I want to be honest with you about something most people in the spiritual space won't say out loud.

When I first started awakening, I looked at people like sheep.

I couldn't understand how they were happy. How they could go to work, come home, watch television, repeat. And feel nothing pulling at them from underneath. How they could stay so comfortably inside a life that felt, to me, like a dream nobody had chosen to question.

You have to be asleep to live it.

And for a while, I wore that understanding like a badge. I felt separate. Elevated. Like I could see something others couldn't.

I remember sitting in a pub with old friends, people I had known for years, people I genuinely loved, and feeling like I was watching them through glass. They were laughing, talking about nothing in particular, completely at ease. And I was sitting there thinking: don't you feel it? Don't you feel the thing underneath all of this?

I didn't say it out loud. But I felt it constantly. And over time, it started to harden into something that felt dangerously close to contempt.

And that feeling, and I need to be honest about this, was not awakening.

That was my unhealed ego finding a new costume to wear.

The same character that used to perform for validation had simply found a more sophisticated way to feel superior. The same wound, dressed differently. The same fear, given a spiritual frame.

The Ego Is Not What Most People Think

It took me a long time to understand what the ego actually is.

Most people think of ego as arrogance. Superiority. Loudness. The need to dominate or feel important.

But the ego is not just the inflated self.

The ego is also the protector.

It is the part of you that learned how to survive pain. The part that reacts when it feels rejected, abandoned, humiliated, unseen, unsafe, or out of control. It is the voice that says:

How could they do this to me? Why is this happening to me? This isn't fair.

Not because you are weak or broken, but because some part of you is trying to protect an identity built around safety and survival.

I first started to understand this because my partner held up a mirror and showed me what I didn't want to see.

At that point I genuinely believed I had moved beyond ego. I thought I was more understanding, more spiritually aware, more conscious than I had been. And in my naivety, I couldn't see that I was still responding from exactly the place I thought I had healed. She couldn't tell me why. But she could see it happening, and she showed me.

That was uncomfortable in a way that is hard to describe. Because the ego doesn't announce itself. It doesn't come to you wearing a sign. It hides inside your most reasonable-sounding justifications, your most spiritual-seeming responses. And when someone points to it, the first reaction is often to defend against the very thing being named.

But I stayed with it. Rather than dismissing what she had shown me, I started questioning why I responded the way I did in certain situations. That questioning is what led me deeper. And the more I looked, the clearer it became: my reactions weren't random. They were protective. The ego had formed around old pain, around the places where I had been hurt or humiliated or felt unsafe, and it had built a whole architecture of responses designed to make sure none of that happened again.

We have all suffered in one way or another. And in those moments of pain, something in us learns to protect itself. That protection is the ego. It isn't a flaw. It was never a flaw. It was intelligence. It was survival.

The problem is that it doesn't always know when the danger has passed.

And it doesn't only protect through defensiveness or anger. One of its subtler tools is expectation. The ego creates expectations as a way of trying to control outcomes, to engineer the validation and safety it is always seeking. When those expectations aren't met, it generates resentment, and resentment keeps us feeling separate, keeps us feeling wronged, keeps the wound alive.

I didn't see that for a long time. I thought my expectations of other people were reasonable. Justified, even. But beneath every unmet expectation was the same old machinery: a part of me trying to get something from the outside that I hadn't yet found on the inside.

As I looked deeper, I also started listening to my intuition more closely. When I questioned something about my own ego, I would sit with it, and these moments of clarity would arrive. Downloads, I came to call them. Pieces of understanding that felt less like thinking and more like remembering.

And what I began to see was that the ego is not one thing. It is multifaceted. It wears many different masks. The mask of confidence. The mask of humility. The mask of the spiritual seeker. The mask of the person who has it together. All of them, at their root, doing the same job: keeping the vulnerable self out of harm's way.

I thought healing meant killing it. I thought the ego itself was the distortion. Something artificial. Something to transcend completely.

Everyone talks about ego death. Killing the ego. Destroying the self. And for a while I chased that idea the way I had chased everything else: with the determination to do it right, to do it thoroughly, to not leave anything unhealed.

But over time I realised that the ego is not separate from the human experience.

It is part of it.

The issue is not that the ego exists. The issue is when wounded protection mechanisms begin running your entire life.

An unhealed ego is loud. It needs to be seen. It needs to control, analyse, compare, defend, judge, perform. It constantly seeks validation because underneath all of that noise is fear.

Look at me. Validate me. Choose me. Tell me I matter.

But a healed ego feels very different.

It is quiet.

Not weak. Not passive. Not lacking confidence. Just no longer driven by the desperate need to prove itself constantly.

What genuinely changed things for me was when I started to recognise the ego's energy.

Not the story it was telling. Not the justification it was building. The actual feeling of it. That particular charge that arises in the body just before you react, before you defend, before you pull rank or withdraw or perform. Once I could feel it coming, I could do something I had never been able to do before: I could pause.

And in that pause, something shifted permanently.

Because once you truly understand what the ego is, once you see it clearly for what it has been doing and why, you stop being angry at it. You stop trying to fight it or kill it or transcend it. You feel something closer to gratitude.

I remember the moment I spoke to it directly. Not out loud. But clearly, in the way you speak to something you finally understand. I said: thank you. Thank you for protecting me all these years. Thank you for doing the job you thought needed doing. But I'm old enough now. I'm strong enough now. I can protect myself.

You don't get to drive anymore.

You can stay. You're part of me and you always will be. But you're going to the back seat.

That was the change. It wasn't dramatic. It didn't arrive with fanfare. It was just a quiet internal renegotiation with a part of myself I had either been fighting or unconsciously obeying my entire life.

I didn't lose my confidence.

I lost the need to perform it.

And I want to be clear about something, because I think this matters.

That didn't mean the ego disappeared. It still doesn't. There are still moments where Brian, which is what I named my ego, wants to rear his head. And that's okay. You don't change a habit of a lifetime in an instant. You don't rewire decades of protection mechanisms through a single realisation, however profound.

What changed was my relationship with those moments.

When I respond from ego without realising it in the moment, I no longer beat myself up about it. Upon reflection I can see it: that was Brian. That was a protective response. And then I can have a word with him. I can acknowledge what happened, understand why it happened, and choose differently next time.

Naming him helped more than I expected. Because once you give something a name, it stops being you. Brian is part of me, but he is not all of me. And that distance, however small, is where the choice lives.

What Nobody Prepares You For

Real awakening humbled me. It didn't elevate me above anyone.

It showed me that everybody is exactly where they are supposed to be. That no journey is above or below another. That judging someone else for being asleep is just another form of being asleep yourself.

But before I got there, in that raw, disorienting middle period, the loneliness was real.

When you begin to heal, something shifts in how you relate to the world around you.

Conversations that used to feel normal start to feel hollow. Environments that used to feel comfortable start to feel suffocating. Friendships that were built on a version of you that no longer exists start to quietly dissolve. Not through argument or falling out, but through a growing distance that neither person quite knows how to name.

It wasn't just people either. I lost my thirst for entertainment. I would sit down to watch something and find I couldn't stay with it. The noise of it, the shallowness of it, started to feel unbearable in a way I couldn't explain to anyone around me. I started to see Hollywood for what it was: hollow wood.

I think that's worth saying plainly, because we live in a culture that has traded its hunger for knowledge for a hunger for distraction. Most people around you are consuming constantly, and that consumption is part of what keeps the dream intact. When you stop being able to do that, when the screen starts to feel like a wall rather than a window, it creates another layer of distance from the world you used to inhabit.

You find yourself sitting in a room full of people and feeling completely alone.

Not because anything is wrong with you. Not because you are better than anyone around you. But because you are changing, and change creates a gap between where you were and where you are going. For a while, you exist in that gap alone.

I lost friendships during this period. Not gradually, not through slow drift. The moment I started speaking my truth, the moment I began sharing what I was going through, some people were gone almost instantly. No long farewell. No period of growing distance. Just: here, and then not here.

That shocked me at the time. I hadn't expected the speed of it. I needed depth. Substance. I needed conversations that went somewhere real. And simply by asking for that, by being honest about what was happening inside me, I watched certain people step back as though I had become someone they no longer recognised.

One friendship in particular stands out.

I hadn't reached out. He came to me. And what he had to say was that what I was going through was nonsense, and that if I carried on the way I was going, I was going to lose a lot of friends.

I had expected support. What I got felt like an attack. And my ego responded instantly. I told him where he could take his opinion, and I meant every word of it in that moment.

Looking back, I can see it clearly. The expectation that because I had shown up for him, he would show up for me. And when he didn't, the ego took the wheel. It felt justified. It felt righteous, even. That is what the ego does when it feels threatened: it fires back.

The anger was real. But underneath it was hurt. And underneath the hurt was an expectation I hadn't examined yet.

It was only in later reflection that I could see he wasn't being cruel. He was working from his own template. Whatever emotional intelligence he had, he couldn't extend it to me in that moment. He could only give what he was capable of giving at the time.

That realisation didn't undo the hurt. But it changed what I did with it.

I chose forgiveness. Not for his sake, but for mine. Because carrying resentment toward someone for not being able to give what they don't have is one of the quieter ways we keep ourselves in pain.

The forgiveness was part of the healing too.

And as for losing friends over it: if people walk away because you chose to wake up, they were never truly your friends in the first place.

There was grief in that. Real grief. I want to name that clearly, because the spiritual community often rushes past it. They talk about releasing what no longer serves you as though it is a clean and painless process. As though letting go of a friendship is the same as deleting an old file. It isn't. These were real people who mattered. The loss deserves to be felt.

But there is something else nobody tells you. Something that can make the loneliness feel even more confusing.

Sometimes the distance isn't just drift. Sometimes your changing actively unsettles the people around you. Not because they are cruel or small. But because when you start questioning the life you were living, you become, without meaning to, a mirror for the lives they haven't questioned yet.

Your willingness to look at things honestly can feel like an implicit challenge to someone who isn't ready to do the same. Your peace, when you start to find it, can feel threatening to someone still organised around anxiety. Your refusal to keep performing can make the people still performing deeply uncomfortable, because it raises a question they don't want to sit with: why am I still doing this?

You haven't said a word. But something in you is asking the question anyway.

And so people pull back. Or they push against you. Or they need you to shrink back to the version of yourself they recognised, the one that didn't make them feel anything they weren't prepared to feel.

It is one of the lonelier parts of this process. Because you are not trying to threaten anyone. You are just trying to become more honest. And that honesty, simply by existing, disturbs something in the people still invested in the illusion.

Helena Blavatsky wrote that we live inside the most beautiful prison ever created, because none of the prisoners even realise they are in prison. It is a prison of the mind. Built from beliefs, from conditioning, from the unquestioned stories we inherited about what life is supposed to look like. And every one of us has held the keys to the door since birth.

But here is the part that stings: when someone actually uses those keys and walks out, the people still inside don't cheer. They warn. They worry. They tell you about all the dangers that lie beyond the walls. And in doing so, without meaning to, they become the jailers of their own prison, and they try to make you a prisoner again too.

Not out of malice. Out of fear. Because your freedom is a reminder of the door they haven't opened yet.

But here is something that helped me hold it more gently.

When friendships fall away during this period, it doesn't mean they were false. It doesn't mean something has gone permanently wrong. It simply means that in this moment, your frequencies no longer match. And that's okay. It isn't a verdict. It isn't a goodbye written in stone. It just means that right now, you are not meant to be walking this particular stretch of path together.

Frequencies can find each other again. People surprise you. The friend who couldn't meet you where you were at thirty might be exactly the person who understands you at forty. You don't have to close the door. You just have to stop standing in the doorway waiting for something that isn't ready to happen yet.

And there is something else worth holding onto during this period. By staying in your truth, by continuing to hold the light even when nobody around you seems to see it, you are doing something that will matter later. Because when the people who once dismissed you start to see it themselves, when they begin to feel the pull toward something deeper, when they finally start to see the wood through the trees, you will be the first person they come to. Not because you told them what to think. But because you showed them, simply by how you lived, that another way was possible.

That is one of the things nobody tells you when they talk about spiritual awakening. They tell you about the expansion, the clarity, the connection to something greater. They don't always tell you about the friendships that quietly end. The family gatherings that start to feel unbearable. The sense that you are speaking a language nobody around you understands yet.

Two Kinds of Lonely

I was fortunate. Through the most intense periods of my awakening I had my partner Tamsyn, and my friends Sue and Phil. I had people who could hold some of what I was experiencing, even imperfectly. That made an enormous difference.

But Tamsyn's experience was different from mine.

When we first got together, I remember thinking: I have waited thirty nine years to meet this person. The one. Someone I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And then we both began awakening at the same time, which felt extraordinary. Like it was meant.

But I was awakening faster. And my ego, doing what the ego does, expected her to keep up.

What I didn't understand at the time was that she was suffering from nervous system overwhelm. The intensity of what we were both going through was too much, and instead of holding space for her process, I became overbearing. I was so caught up in my own expansion that I couldn't see what I was doing to her. And eventually she pushed me away. Told me there was nothing between us that could be fixed or salvaged.

My ego felt devastated. Betrayed, even. Here was the person I had finally allowed fully into my life, and at the first real test, it felt like she had thrown it all away. Brian was in full voice. Bruised. Loud. Inconsolable.

I drove to Portugal in two days to stay with Sue and Phil. The drive was two days of noise in my head. The breakup. The friend who had told me I was talking nonsense. The anger, the heartbreak, the frustration, all of it rising at once with nowhere to go. On the way I was listening to Joe Dispenza's Becoming Supernatural, but I was too deep in it to really hear it.

It wasn't until I arrived. Until I finally had space to exhale. That I sat with everything, and something Dispenza had said on that drive came back to me with complete clarity: thoughts create chemicals, chemicals create emotions. Which means if you can change the way you think, you can change the way you feel. And if you can change the way you feel, you can change your life.

I had heard it on the road. But I was only ready to receive it in the stillness.

Another thing from that same audiobook stayed with me too: where attention goes, energy flows. Which meant that every time I placed my attention on the loss, on the rejection, on the anger, I was feeding it. Giving it more of myself. And every time I chose to place it somewhere else, on the love, the growth, the beauty of what we had shared, I was feeding that instead.

Every time a negative thought came in, I caught it and flipped it. Instead of sitting in the loss and the rejection, I redirected to the beauty. The love we had shared. The growth. The experiences we had lived together. All of it. And when I held that against the pain, the beauty far outweighed it.

After a week or so, the negative thoughts stopped coming. And what was left was something I hadn't expected: gratitude. I could look at Tamsyn, at everything we had been through together, and feel only admiration. Whether we found our way back to each other or not, I was grateful I had met her. Grateful for every moment of it.

That shift didn't come from suppressing the pain. It came from choosing, again and again, where to place my attention. That is not the same thing as denial. It is one of the most honest forms of healing I know.

We have been through multiple exhale periods since then, Tamsyn and I. Moments where the intensity required us to step back from each other, to process separately, to release. But every time we have inhaled again, we have come back stronger. More honest. More deeply ourselves, and more deeply connected because of it. This is how everything works. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. It is the breath of the universe. It is life. The exhale is not the end. It is just the pause before the next inhale.

And in those moments when we needed that space, when the intensity became overwhelming for both of us and we had to exhale separately, Tamsyn had nobody.

Not because she was unloved. But because what she was going through was so far outside the vocabulary of the people around her that there was simply nowhere to take it. No one who could sit with it without trying to fix it, minimise it, or redirect it back to the surface.

I think about the particular cruelty of that. Not cruelty from any individual. Just the cruelty of the situation itself. To be going through something enormous. To have people around you who love you. And to still be completely alone with it, because the language for what you are experiencing simply doesn't exist in the world you currently inhabit.

She was going through one of the most profound transformations a human being can experience, and she was going through it essentially alone.

I think about that a lot. Because I know she is not the only one.

There are people reading this right now who are in exactly that place. Awake enough to feel everything differently. Not yet surrounded by people who understand. Carrying something enormous in silence because there is nowhere safe to put it down.

This is for you.

What the Loneliness Actually Is

Here is what I want you to understand about what you are feeling.

The loneliness of healing is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is not punishment. It is not evidence that you are too much, too intense, too different to be loved or understood.

It is transition.

When you begin to heal, when the mask comes off, when the old patterns start to dissolve, when you stop performing and start becoming, your entire system has to recalibrate. Your nervous system, which was wired around survival and protection, has to learn what safety feels like without the armour. Your identity, which was built around a character that no longer fits, has to find out what it actually is underneath.

That process takes time. And during that time, there is often a period of not quite belonging anywhere.

I used to describe it as living in limbo. You've left one room. The next door hasn't opened yet. And you're just standing there in the cold and the quiet, wondering if you made a terrible mistake by walking through the first door in the first place.

I process through my heart, not through writing things down. I lived these experiences, so I can return to them without needing a record. Not to relive the pain, but to move back through the thought patterns, the moments, the understanding that came through feeling rather than thinking. Because not everything that needs to be understood can be understood by the mind. Some things are understood by the heart. And the heart doesn't just analyse. It trusts.

I am still not fully in the new world yet. But it is coming. Bit by bit, it is arriving. Because here is what I have come to understand: you can raise your frequency in an instant. But the world around you doesn't change just as quickly. The outside will eventually mirror you, the construct around you will catch up to where you are, but it takes time. The internal shift always comes first. The external confirmation follows. And in the gap between those two things, you have to trust what you can feel before you can see it.

People say you have to see it to believe it. But that has it backwards. You have to believe it to see it. Because even when people do see it, really see it, the conditioned mind will find a way to explain it away. To deny it. To make excuses. To file it under coincidence or delusion or wishful thinking. Seeing alone is never enough for someone who has been programmed not to trust what they see. The belief has to come first. And belief lives in the heart, not the eyes.

That is not loneliness as failure.

That is loneliness as transition.

There is also grief in it. Because the friendships that fall away were real. The version of you that those relationships were built around was real, even if it was a performed version. Letting it go, letting them go, involves a loss that deserves to be acknowledged rather than spiritualised away.

But I want to say something important here. Don't look back on those friendships through a negative lens. At some point, that connection had genuine meaning. It gave you something real. And just because you have awakened, just because your awareness has grown, that doesn't give you the right to judge the people who are still on a different part of their path. They are exactly where they are meant to be, just as you once were.

Appreciate them for what they meant to you. Appreciate what they gave you in that season of your life. And release them, not with contempt, but with gratitude.

You are allowed to grieve what you are outgrowing.

At the time, it can feel like your entire life is falling apart.

People leave. Relationships shift. Old identities begin collapsing. The things that once felt stable no longer fit the version of you that is emerging.

And because there is suddenly so much empty space, the loneliness can feel overwhelming.

But there is a reason for that. And it is worth understanding.

We spend most of our lives in distraction. Noise, screens, busyness, entertainment, other people's dramas, our own. All of it serving the same quiet purpose: keeping us from having to sit with ourselves. Because when the distractions fall away, when the space opens up, things start rising to the surface. The very things we have been pushing down and suppressing, sometimes for decades. Old pain. Old fear. Old wounds that never properly healed because we never gave them the chance to.

That is why the space feels so uncomfortable. It is not empty. It is full of everything you have been avoiding.

And this is the most important thing I can say about that: sit with it. Do not run from it. Do not reach for the next distraction. The discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something is finally coming up to be seen, to be felt, to be released. It is coming up for a reason.

This is where the healing really starts.

Healing is not just about gaining new things. It is also about creating space for them.

I think of it like clearing out an old wardrobe that has been overflowing for years.

Every drawer is full. Every shelf is packed. Every rail is crowded with things you have collected over a lifetime: old identities, old wounds, old coping mechanisms, old relationships, old versions of yourself that no longer fit who you are becoming.

And because everything is so full, nothing new has room to enter.

So healing begins pulling things out.

Sometimes gently. Sometimes painfully.

And often the first things that surface are the oldest and most neglected parts of yourself. The things shoved to the back for years because they were too uncomfortable to look at directly.

For me, as I started clearing out my wardrobe, what came up were feelings I had never allowed myself to feel. Not because I was broken, but because as a child, cutting myself off emotionally was the only way I knew to stop the pain. It was survival. So I stored everything. Locked it away. And got on with living.

But it was all still in there.

As I emptied the wardrobe, those feelings started coming up in ways I didn't expect. One moment I would be laughing uncontrollably. The next, crying in a way I hadn't let myself cry in years. And in between, there were quiet moments of contentment. A stillness I hadn't felt before. Like something that had been clenched for a very long time was finally beginning to relax. Because it isn't only the painful things we suppress. The joy gets stored too. The laughter. The lightness. All the moments of happiness we didn't allow ourselves to fully feel, because feeling the good meant risking feeling the bad. All of it lives in the body, in the nervous system, waiting.

When it comes up, let it. All of it. The tears and the laughter both.

That process can feel messy. Emotional. Disorienting.

But slowly, space begins to appear.

And in that space, something new finally has room to arrive.

The Judgment That Wasn't Awakening

I want to come back to something I said at the beginning. Because I think it matters.

That period where I looked at people like sheep, where I felt separate and superior and quietly frustrated that the world wasn't waking up fast enough, that wasn't the high point of my journey.

It was a stage.

And not a particularly enlightened one.

What actually shifted it wasn't a single conversation or encounter. It was a deepening understanding that came through intention. Because intention is everything. My intention was to fully understand what the ego is, in its entirety, all its layers, all its multifaceted nature, all the different faces and masks it wears. And as that understanding grew, as I remembered more of what the ego truly is, the judgment began to dissolve on its own.

Part of what accelerated that was spending time in spiritual communities online. I would see people speaking fluent spiritual language, using all the right words, talking about light and awakening and consciousness. And yet underneath it, something was off. People complaining that they were exhausted from holding the light. Positioning themselves as the ones carrying everyone else. Performing awakening rather than living it. Still judging, still comparing, still seeking validation, just in spiritual clothing.

I wrote about this in a piece I called Wolves in White Robes. Because that is what I was seeing: people projecting false light, some of them completely unaware they were doing it, some of them, if I'm honest, fully aware. The ego wearing its most sophisticated costume yet.

And if you are early on your path, this is worth knowing. Anyone who asks you to look outside of yourself for your answers, anyone who positions themselves as the one you must follow, the one you must worship, the one who holds the truth you cannot access without them, is not aligned with the light. I say that not to cast anyone into darkness. But because true guidance always points you back to yourself. It always leads you inward. The moment someone makes themselves the destination rather than the signpost, something is off.

And seeing it so clearly in others was what finally allowed me to see it clearly in myself. Not with self-condemnation. With recognition. I had been there too. I had worn versions of that costume. And understanding that, really understanding it, was what moved me from judgment to something softer.

I had been so focused on what I could see, the surface behaviour, the apparent unconsciousness, that I had completely missed the depth underneath.

What I understand now is that everybody is on their own journey. Every single person, at every level of awareness, is exactly where they are supposed to be in this moment. The person who appears completely asleep may be one experience away from the most profound awakening of their life. The person who looks like they have it all figured out may be running from something they haven't faced yet.

We don't know. We can't know.

And the moment we start ranking journeys, mine is deeper, mine is more real, I can see what they can't, we have simply handed our ego a spiritual costume and called it growth.

Real healing doesn't make you feel above people.

It makes you feel more connected to them. More compassionate. More aware of the shared humanity underneath all the different levels of awareness.

That shift, from judgment to compassion, was one of the clearest signs that something in me had genuinely healed. Not because I had achieved some spiritual milestone. But because I stopped needing the separation. I stopped needing the distance to feel safe.

But I want to be clear about what that shift does and doesn't mean. It doesn't mean I lowered my boundaries. It doesn't mean I went back to surrounding myself with people who don't align with where I am. I am intentional now about who I give my energy to, who I allow into my space, and what information I absorb. That discernment is not judgment. It is self-respect.

What changed was what happens inside me when I encounter someone who is still asleep, still performing, still caught in patterns I recognise from my own past. I no longer feel superior. I no longer feel frustrated. I simply see them, acknowledge where they are on their journey, and move on without carrying it. That is the difference. The compassion is internal. The boundaries remain.

You Are Not Alone in This

If you are in that lonely in-between place right now, if you are grieving friendships, feeling disconnected from family, sitting in rooms where nobody speaks your language yet, I want you to hear this.

What you are feeling is real. It is valid. And it is temporary.

Not because the people around you will necessarily catch up. But because you will find your people. The ones who speak the same language. The ones who don't need you to make yourself smaller to make them comfortable. The ones who can sit in depth with you without flinching.

I know this because I am finding mine. Not all at once. Not through any great strategy. Just slowly, as I became more honestly myself, the right people started to appear. New faces. New connections across countries, across continents. What I can only describe as soul family. People I had never met before who felt more familiar than people I had known for years. I have more truthful connections now than at any other point in my life. And I am still finding them. Because the connections I make now are built on truth, not on performance. On resonance, not on proximity or habit.

But there is another reason this period can feel so painful.

For much of our lives, many of us were taught to know ourselves through other people. Through approval. Validation. Attention. Belonging. Being chosen. Being understood.

And when healing begins removing some of those external reference points, it can initially feel like losing yourself.

But what is actually happening is something deeper.

You are being asked to build a relationship with yourself that does not depend on constant external confirmation.

To stop abandoning yourself simply because other people cannot yet meet you where you are.

That is one of the hardest parts of healing.

And one of the most important.

Because eventually, something begins to change.

You stop chasing connection that requires self-abandonment. You stop shrinking yourself to maintain relationships that only worked when you were disconnected from who you truly were.

And slowly, the right people begin to appear.

Not through force. Not through performance. But through resonance.

The more honestly you become yourself, the more clearly the people meant for your life can recognise you.

Until then, be gentle with yourself in the in-between.

The loneliness you are feeling is not evidence that something is wrong with you.

It is evidence that something is changing.

And change, however uncomfortable, is always moving you toward something more real.

Michael Perks is a spiritual guide, energy healer, and author of The Remembering: A Soul-Led Transmission of Awakening and Sovereignty, available on Amazon and Audible. Through his one-to-one healing work, Michael helps people clear emotional wounds, release limiting patterns, reconnect with their authentic selves, and navigate the deeper stages of awakening and transformation.