Getting Lost on the Inner Journey: Existential Crisis or Spiritual Awakening?

Sometimes a person does not only ask, “Where is life going?”

At some point, a more dangerous question arrives:

“Where did I lose myself?”

What we call the inner journey looks romantic from the outside.

Candlelight, slogan-like sentences, stories of spiritual awakening, aphorisms about “finding yourself”…

In reality, it usually does not begin like that.

In reality, it often begins with getting lost.

A weight you cannot name.

Sentences that have lost their meaning.

A state of feeling you belong nowhere.

Is what you are going through an existential crisis, or are these the first signs of that rupture you will later call a “spiritual awakening”?

And the path I walk in Lines of the Void whispers that the two are not all that separate from one another.

The inner journey often begins like a collapse.

A time comes when nothing works the way it used to.

You go to the same job, talk to the same people, live in the same city…

But something inside has shifted out of place.

The meanings that once carried you can no longer hold you.

The question “Why am I doing this?” is no longer a small curiosity that appears in your mind one day; it sits in the centre of your chest like a heavy stone.

The inner journey often starts just like this:

From the outside, “everything is normal”, but inside, nothing is okay.

Sometimes this is called depression.

Sometimes a crisis of meaning.

Sometimes you say, “My life is falling apart,” sometimes, “I lost my soul.”

I wrote Lines of the Void at exactly such a threshold.

While my life looked from the outside as if “everything was going well”, something inside me had already pressed the cancel button.

Existential crisis: the last resistance of the old self.

What we call an existential crisis is not just “being in a bad mood”.

A question that cuts deeper burns inside you:

“What is the real meaning of this life?

And where am I in this play?”

Things you once believed by heart suddenly begin to be questioned.

Your relationships, your job, your faith, your success, even your very notions of good and evil…

You feel as if you have been pushed to the margins of your own life.

As if there is a play being performed on stage; your name is written on the poster, but you are sitting backstage, unable to remember what you are playing and why.

An existential crisis often whispers this:

“I cannot go on like this. But I don’t know how to go on either.”

This in-between place is the space that challenges us the most, softens us the most, and grows us the most.

Stories of spiritual awakening usually tell only what comes after:

Cleansing, peace, stillness, surrender…

But first something has to fall apart.

And from the outside, that collapse often looks like nothing more than a “breakdown”.

Spiritual awakening: not a light, but the darkness that comes first.

When we hear “spiritual awakening”, our mind usually produces images full of light.

Yet in my experience, awakening first passes through a dark room.

Some of the sentences on which you have built your whole life begin to crack:

“This is just the kind of person I am.”

“Life has to be like this.”

“I can’t live without this.”

As those sentences collapse, one feeling grows more than any other inside you:

“Then who am I?”

This question is the shared centre of both existential crisis and spiritual awakening.

Sometimes you really are in a depression; your energy is gone, you have withdrawn from life, you don’t want to do anything.

And sometimes the very same signs are the herald of a deeper spiritual search.

One of the things I tried to say in Lines of the Void was this:

Not every dark period has to turn into an awakening.

But most awakenings do not come without darkness.

You lose something.

A belief, a role, a person, an identity…

From the outside, it is just a “loss”.

From the inside, it is sometimes like this:

You are slowly being taken out of your old skin.

Crisis of meaning: the old meaning has died, the new one has not yet been born.

A crisis of meaning is like being stuck between two worlds.

Your old map of meaning no longer works.

The equation “good job, good relationship, a certain order = a good life” no longer satisfies you.

But you have no new equation you can put in its place.

In this interval, you face one of your greatest fears:

The void.

The void often feels like “nothingness”.

As if everything has been wasted, as if nothing means anything anymore.

Yet some voids arrive precisely to clear the space where old meanings once stood.

New meaning wants to sprout in that emptiness.

As I wrote Lines of the Void, I tried to stop seeing this emptiness only as “destruction”.

Perhaps it was an invitation:

“Welcome to the funeral of your old meanings.

Now, are you willing to seek the meanings that truly belong to you?”

The inner journey begins exactly at this point.

At the moment when you are willing to let go of the meanings others have chosen on your behalf and to search for your own meaning, your own voice, your own path.

Spiritual search or escape from pain?

Here there is a dangerous zone.

Inside an existential crisis, a person often cannot bear the pain.

And that is deeply human.

Right at this point, some “spiritual paths” step in.

The words are beautiful, the sentences soft, the promise very seductive:

They offer to cover your pain with a thin light.

“Everything is already perfect.”

“Pain is just an illusion.”

“Just raise your consciousness and the rest will come.”

But sometimes pain is not something that should simply be “glossed over”.

Sometimes passing through that pain is the awakening itself.

If your spiritual search turns into an escape from pain, you only put on a new mask.

Lacquering your depression with a shiny spiritual varnish does not heal it.

It only makes it invisible.

For me, awakening began not with running away from pain, but with being able to look at it honestly.

“Yes, right now I feel terrible.

Yes, it feels like everything is falling apart.

Yes, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

At the place where I could say these sentences, something new quietly began to sprout:

A state of being genuine with myself.

The inner journey is a path to be walked not with cruelty towards yourself, but with compassion.

When you embark on the inner journey, your mind can sometimes be harsher than you are.

“If you’re questioning this much, you are weak.”

“If you can’t get out of it, you haven’t evolved.”

“If you’re in this much pain, it means you’re not aware enough.”

In reality, though, being able to ask questions is courage.

Being able to face yourself is courage.

Even admitting that you are going through an existential crisis is to cross a threshold most people never dare to face.

The inner journey advances not by judging yourself more, but by looking at yourself with more honesty and more mercy.

At times on this journey, you may also need professional support:

A therapist, a counsellor, a guide you trust…

This does not mean you are “spiritually weak”.

On the contrary, it means you are human enough to say, “I don’t have to carry this weight all alone.”

Existential crisis or spiritual awakening?

Perhaps both, perhaps both at once.

I no longer see this distinction as so sharp.

An existential crisis is sometimes the scream of your soul saying, “I cannot go on like this.”

Spiritual awakening is the birth of a new voice in the long silence that follows that scream.

Crisis alienates you from your old self.

Awakening draws you closer to the self you do not yet know.

They may both be different doors in the same corridor.

Which one you passed through, you often only understand when you look back.

Lines of the Void, for me, was a text written right in that corridor.

I did not want to speak only of darkness, nor to construct a fake story of light.

I only wanted to say this:

“If you feel lost, your inner journey may have already begun.

This unhappiness, this crisis of meaning, may be an invitation:

An invitation to look at yourself more closely.”

Feeling lost is not always bad news.

I am not writing this to say, “There is always an amazing awakening hidden in every crisis.”

Life does not fit into formulas that simple.

But I do not hesitate to say this:

The inner journey often begins exactly where you think, “I am going the wrong way.”

What you call an existential crisis is sometimes your soul’s way of nudging you.

Spiritual searching sometimes begins quietly at the point where you say, “I don’t believe in anything anymore.”

If for some time you have not felt you truly belong anywhere, if you feel life has lost its meaning, if you find yourself returning again and again during the day to the question, “What am I doing?”…

This may not be just a breakdown.

It may also be the creaking of the door calling you toward a version of “you” you have never met before.

The inner journey may not look bright from the outside.

But one day, when you look back, you may say of the time you thought was the darkest:

“It was not there that I got lost.

It was there that, for the first time, I set out towards myself.”