The Day I Could No Longer Recognise Myself: The First Step of the Journey to Finding Yourself

One day you wake up and your life is exactly the same; but you are not.

You drink the same coffee, walk the same streets, talk to the same people.

But when you turn inward, there is no one there you recognise.

This is exactly the day the journey to finding yourself begins.

The day no one notices, you tell no one about, and yet it shakes you to the core.

The stranger in the mirror asks: “When did I become this person?”

I still remember that day very clearly.

If you looked at the calendar, it was probably an ordinary day; but inside me it was a turning point.

I stood in front of the mirror.

The person I saw was me and yet it wasn’t.

There was tiredness in my eyes, yes.

But it wasn’t just about lack of sleep.

Something else was missing behind my eyes: myself.

Self-alienation begins this quietly.

Without telling anyone, without changing any of the scenes, simply noticing deep down that you are “acting a role”…

From the outside everything seems fine; your job, your responsibilities, your relationships, the smiles you post on social media…

But at night, when you don’t have to entertain anyone and you take off the smile that has frozen on your face, you are left with a very simple but devastating question:

“When did I become this person?”

This question is the sentence form of that inner feeling of being lost.

What you are experiencing is not losing your identity completely, but drifting away from yourself.

And without noticing, you have come to the threshold of the question “Who am I?”

Feeling lost is not a defect, it is an invitation...

For a long time I thought feeling lost was a problem.

As if everyone else knew their place, their direction, who they were, and only I had lost my way.

Then I realised this:

Most of the time, when a person feels “lost”, it is a sign that they can no longer lie to themselves.

You say, “I’m fine,” but you are not.

You say, “It’s normal for me to be like this,” but deep down you know this is not a life that belongs to you.

You say, “Everyone lives like this,” and move on, but a part of you whispers: “I am not everyone.”

That whisper is the rawest beginning of the journey to finding yourself.

The journey of finding yourself begins the moment you accept that you have lost yourself.

You think it is a malfunction; in fact it is a call sent to you by your soul.

Feeling lost is the first signal your inner world sends you:

“You are not here. You are here and yet you are not. Come on, let’s go back to yourself.”

Self-alienation does not come with great explosions; it comes with small leakages.

At first you don’t notice, then you overlook it, and finally you reach a point where you can no longer pretend it isn’t there.

Maybe in a very crowded place, in the middle of a conversation, the feeling of “I don’t belong here” suddenly sits in your throat.

Maybe you no longer take any pleasure in the things you once enjoyed, but silence yourself by saying, “I shouldn’t be spoiled about such things.”

Maybe you always show your family, your spouse, your friends, your colleagues the version of you that “handles things”, “gets by”, “doesn’t cause problems”, while hiding the broken part inside.

Maybe you have turned your own voice down so much that you can’t even quite name what you like, what makes you angry, what hurts you.

From the outside it looks like you have a life that “works”; but there is no one living inside.

This is trying to force yourself to continue a life that you do not live together with your own soul.

The day you say, “I no longer recognise myself,” is nothing but the accumulation of all these small signs.

“Kendime Giden Yollar”ın Gerçek Çıkış Noktası

When I sat down to write Paths to Myself, I didn’t have a grand plan or flawless plot.

All I had was this sentence:

“I can no longer stand myself, because I don’t know myself.”

This book was born not from a period when I was strong, but from a period when I was beginning to unravel.

I sat at the table not as a “writer” but as a “witness”; I laid out in front of me, one by one, all the scenes in which I had drifted away from myself, denied myself, felt ashamed of myself, forgotten myself.

From the outside, the journey to finding yourself may look romantic.

From the inside, however, it looks much more like this sentence:

“I can’t go on living like this.”

Paths to Myself is in fact a kind of memoir woven around this sentence.

It is not a “how-to” book that tells you what must be done; it is a book of witnessing that shows how a person slowly collapses inside when those things are not done.

The journey to finding yourself is not made of big enlightenments but of small turns...

Sometimes we think the journey to finding yourself begins with a single big moment of enlightenment.

One morning you wake up; you understand everything, your life changes, you change…

In reality this road begins with small, seemingly ordinary moments.

When you choose to be silent in the middle of a conversation,

When you want to make decisions not so that “everyone likes it” but so that “it sits right with me”, when you notice that you have been living to earn approval and for the first time ask, “Do I really want this?”, when on your way home from work you say, “This isn’t my place” and feel that inner tremor begin…

Each of these is a small but radical step you take in order to return to yourself.

The journey of finding yourself is most often the sum of inner transformations that no one applauds and no one even notices.

If one day you look in the mirror and say, “I don’t recognise myself anymore,” know this:

Your soul set out long ago; you have only realised it late.

The question “Who am I?” is not a threat, it is simply a door...

The question “Who am I?” feels frightening to many people.

As if asking this question meant throwing away everything you have lived so far…

Yet this question is not a threat; it is a door.

To say “Who am I?” means, “Am I only going to squeeze myself into the roles that have been assigned to me, or will I also hear my own voice?”

It means, “Am I only the person others expect me to be, or is there still someone inside who has never been able to speak?”

It means, “Is my life really mine?”

The day you dare to ask this question, you have crossed the most critical threshold of self-alienation.

Feeling lost does not mean you have no answer; it means you have finally begun to ask the question from the right place.

“Do I feel this way too?”

Perhaps as you read these lines, you too are, without realising, turning towards yourself:

Perhaps you have been waking up to mornings when you no longer recognise yourself.

You live in the same city, the same house, carry the same people, but something inside no longer feels the same.

You tell yourself, “Everything is supposed to be fine,” but a part of you whispers, “It isn’t.”

Then I want to leave you with just this one question:

When was the last time you truly saw yourself?

When was the last time you looked in the mirror and said, “This is me”?

Or have you been wandering around your own life as a guest for a long time now?

The sentence “I don’t recognise myself anymore” feels like a collapse when you first hear it.

As if everything were over, you were lost, and the way back was closed…

Today, looking back, I see this:

That sentence was actually the biggest door that opened inside me.

It was the first jolt I needed in order to step out of the narrow moulds of my old self, to stop lying to myself, to rediscover who I was, more deeply.

Paths to Myself was born exactly out of that jolt.

That is why this text is not just a confession or just a description; it is an invitation.

If these days you too feel alienated from yourself, feel lost, feel a distance between you and the face in the mirror, know this:

This is not the end.

This may be the very first step on the journey to finding yourself.

And no journey can find a more honest beginning than the sentence, “I can’t go on like this anymore.”