It's amazing that one day you can wake up in the morning, go look at yourself in a mirror, and fail to recognize the reflection. You can stare into the deepest parts of your outermost being without fully being able to crack the surface to see inside, while others ask you consistently what's wrong.
There's never really an answer to that.
It's most comparable to an out of body experience. You walk around and go about your daily life without truly realizing what you're doing. You feel completely disconnected from the world around you, as if you could simply leave it and the wind would continue swaying its usual sway. You are not yourself.
The problem with getting back to yourself is that you're not sure who that even is anymore. Sure, you can see the same friends and do the same hobbies as you used to, but at the end of the day as you take the pain off of you, you're not even sure who you are anymore.
The pain of being unaware of yourself is more excruciating than the pain of others being unaware of you. When you're not yourself, you don't want to go out in public. You don't want to meet new people or join new clubs. You don't want to give others the impression that you're completely fine because the reality is that you don't even know yourself right now.
One day, someone told me the famous quote, "Life isn't about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself."
I lived by that for a very long time, but as I continued thinking about it I realized that life is about finding that person you had once created. It's about staying in touch with that creation that you made, not about continually re-creating someone as you forget who the "old" you was.
You are hurting. You are hiding behind the mundane parts of life as you continue finding commitment after commitment so that you don't have the spare time to sit around and think about things like this. You start hanging around only yourself because you don't know who you are, but as time goes on and you try finding the answers to those questions, you immediately become someone else.
You stop caring about the world around you and the world inside you.
You fail to recognize the life that is in the depths of your own being and complete actions that you may never dreamed you would have. You are not you, you are someone else, but the fact is that you are now who you have become. You just don't care.
I am you. I am not myself. I am unsure of the meaning of the world and I am unsure of the meaning of the world within. If you are me, you know the feeling. You know the constant questioning, headaches, pain, and hunger. You know the feeling.
Finding yourself is hard. The journey is one of constant struggle and never-ending pain, but someday you may be thanking yourself for trying instead of giving up.