I Decided to Be Myself, But It Cost Me Everything

The honest, messy work of unlearning who I was expected to be

Spiritual Lounge #24

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Before I knew anything about purpose or authenticity, I knew this: I was a girl who kept changing her hair.

“Jenifer Andrea Cerero,

How many times will you dye your hair?

How many times will you cut it, until you finally feel it’s enough?”-

Those were the questions my mom used to yell at me during my teens, every time I came home with a new hairstyle to show off.

As a teenager, I always felt the need to explore with my clothes, to be curious about my appearance. I enjoyed the game of questioning my choices and experimenting with different characters. The ones, I remember the most were the role of the good girl in sweet floral dresses, the rebel without a cause lost in punk music, and the mix I created of both.

Between my fifteen and my twenties, I experimented with different personalities, identities, and versions of myself, not because I wanted to be someone I wasn’t, but because I was curious to understand more about myself.

For the outside world, I was a lost young person searching for attention. But for my soul, I was simply testing. I was in sync with the journey I came here for. The one that eventually made me ask deeper questions and realize I was so much more than I’d been told.

I’m becoming an stranger:

My spiritual journey, like many of us, started with disruption. With chaos that destroyed the world I knew. I was just 23 when I went back to Colombia after a long trip to the USA. The shock, the feeling of not belonging, of not being able to fit back into the past version of me, was the first destruction I ever experienced. My world felt like it was being blown apart.

Image by Alexey Taktarov

Nothing was the same. I started to doubt myself and experience deep loneliness. I felt distant and apart from the environment I thought was my home. It was difficult and painful. I remember that, for my parents and friends back then, I had become a complete stranger. I had changed too much. I didn’t fit anymore into the standards I used to think were my truth, standards that were still the only truth for those around me.

I was constantly criticized and judged. I felt misunderstood. Nobody could relate to the expansion I had gone through. Nobody could understand that I wasn’t trying to make people feel less for who they were. I just couldn’t relate to them in the same way anymore. Because for me, that trip transformed everything, it changed my understanding about myself and the world.

At such a young age, it’s hard to understand what is happening. It’s hard to admit you are being called into a path of transformation. We aren’t yet mature enough to be fully conscious of it, and all the negative feelings and insecurities start to creep in.

My first spiritual “awakening” came like that; feeling alone, weird, and separated from the people I loved. One of the most difficult things I had to do at that time was decide to break up with them. To leave behind my family, my roots, my friends, and the life I had, to figure out who I really was.

I decided to leave Colombia and embark on a journey that would last multiple years. It became a decade-long process with many locations, different people, and countless situations and challenges that allowed me to explore myself in all kinds of versions.

Not much is said in the personal development space about this, but discovering yourself and embracing your authentic self takes more than a course. We can read all the books and watch all the videos, but in the end, it’s the experience of exposing ourselves to different environments, cultures, people, and situations that gives us the clues to understand ourselves a little more.

For ten years, I went back and forth. I lived in eight countries, with detours and countless new beginnings. For ten years, I was a nomad with no roots, just walking the path of experimenting with myself, the same way I did in my teens with my clothes.

I do believe we cannot discover who we are if we don’t step out of our comfort zones, if we don’t face challenges, and if we aren’t willing to make hard decisions. It’s through the uncomfortable that we begin to understand ourselves.

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I Didn’t Ask for This

It wasn’t until I became a mom that I was confronted with another identity death.After giving birth, I couldn’t recognize myself anymore. I wasn’t just adapting to a new role or a new “job.” I was experiencing grief. The girl I knew I was until then was saying goodbye. She was leaving to never come back, and I was meeting this new woman I didn’t know yet.

I can say with honesty that my postpartum period was one of the darkest I have ever been through. I was physically tired and exhausted while mentally and emotionally in blackout. I’m not proud to say it, but I wasn’t the nicest person to be around at that time. I was angry, sad, frustrated, and confused, because deep down, I was going through a transformation that awakened all my deep shadows.

Nobody around me could understand. Again, I felt alone. I felt apart. And I was constantly beating myself up because I wasn’t enjoying the idea of being a mom. My world was falling apart, my work, my business, the person I was, it all stopped feeling right. Even though I tried to keep the facade of having everything under control, I was dying inside.

It took me three months, exactly, after my son was born to realize the urgency I felt to drop, cut, and erase everything. To go into hermit mode.

I stopped my business, my work, and decided to dedicate myself to healing and nurturing myself. Because here’s the thing: the path of self-discovery doesn’t just ask us to adapt to new circumstances and grow. There is always a moment when it requires us to confront ourselves in the mirror and look at the parts we’ve been denying.

Self notes, 2023. © All rights reserved.

Becoming a mom unleashed an inner urge to scream out, to look after my wounds and the fear of being seen. To finally face the feeling of unworthiness I had carried for years. It made me question the woman I wanted to be. It forced me to liberate myself from the constant need for external approval to feel happy and successful. It broke the prison where I’d kept my inner child locked away, finally giving her space to speak up and tell me that we were pursuing things we didn’t even want.

It has been two and a half years of many little deaths. A period where nobody, not even myself, fully understands what I’m doing. A season of experimentation and remembrance. Of nurturing parts of me I had forgotten. A period of moving forward and then suddenly turning back.

A time when I haven’t been able to explain to anyone what my plan is.

It has been two and a half years of isolation, of long conversations with myself, of tears and laughs with my inner world, of journals filled with truths and moments of hugs from my partner, every time I told him I was collapsing again. But it has also been two and a half years of deep self-understanding, of learning to trust and love myself.

It has been a time of accepting and understanding that it doesn’t matter our age, our color, our nationality, or the roles we have. The journey of remembering who we are and aligning with our authentic self will always take us to moments where we cry, scream, feel afraid, and feel alone in a world with 8.2 billion people.

Until one day, we start to feel more comfortable walking alone, more aligned.
More confident in our own skin, and we realize that the uncomfortable process of figuring ourselves out may be the hardest, but the best choice of all.

Con amor,
Jen 🫶

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