I Thought I Had Lost Myself
How I spent years trying to become someone new before realizing I was trying to become someone I already was.
For years I thought I hated people.
I dreaded walking into rooms. I avoided conversations. Every interaction felt like a performance.
Looking back, I don’t think I hated people at all.
I think I hated the version of myself that I imagined they were seeing.
That realization changed my life.
Before I feared people, I loved them.
One of my earliest memories is of a girl in kindergarten.
Whenever she walked over to play, the other children picked up their toys and left.
Her parents struggled with drug addiction, and she had been affected before she was even born.
The other children saw someone different.
I just saw another child.
So I played with her.
At that age, I didn’t think about status or popularity. I didn’t wonder whether someone was “worth” talking to.
I simply liked people.
Somewhere along the way, I lost that.
The day I started seeing people as judges
When I was a teenager I became quiet.
I spent breaks alone.
Eventually I built up the courage to tell my crush how I felt.
She rejected me.
It wasn’t a dramatic moment.
But something changed inside me.
Instead of thinking,
She isn’t interested.
I began thinking,
There must be something wrong with me.
That small shift quietly shaped the next few years of my life.
The internet gave me an explanation.
Eventually I discovered Blackpill content.
It seemed to explain everything.
I even paid someone online to rate my appearance.
A few days later the email arrived.
4/10.
I believed every word.
I convinced myself that my loneliness had nothing to do with fear, insecurity, or isolation.
It was simply because I wasn’t attractive enough.
Looking back, that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was that I stopped seeing people as people.
I saw them as judges.
Every conversation became a test.
Every stranger became another opinion.
The breakup that changed everything
Eventually I got a girlfriend.
For a while, I thought I’d solved the problem.
Then we broke up.
I was in South Africa when it happened.
I remember crying for days, convinced I’d be lonely forever.
But somewhere in that pain, another question appeared.
What if I didn’t need another relationship?
What if I needed another version of myself?
Learning to enjoy people again
Back in Sweden I started reading constantly.
One day the library was closed, so I wandered into a nearby community hall.
There was a piano.
I sat down and played.
When I finished, two girls came over and started talking to me.
Years earlier I would’ve spent the walk home replaying every awkward sentence I’d said.
Instead I found myself thinking,
That was nice.
Not because I had impressed anyone.
Because I genuinely enjoyed talking to them.
That became the beginning of something much bigger.
I stopped trying to get people to like me.
I became interested in them.
Looking back
For years I thought I was trying to become someone new.
Now I think I was simply finding my way back.
Back to the child who loved people without judging them.
Back to the version of myself that existed before I became afraid of being seen.
There’s still a photograph of me when I was four years old.
Sometimes I stop and look at it.
For years it felt like I was looking at someone I’d lost.
Now it feels like I'm looking at someone I finally found.
I used to need people because I couldn’t stand being alone with myself.
Now I enjoy being alone.
And strangely...
that’s what allows me to genuinely love people.