The stories we carry — and all the ways they inform us
I have always been afraid of getting lost.
It’s not hard to see where it comes from.
An incident as a child involving a muddy field, an unexpected horse, an abandoned bike, leaping the wrong gate, a frightened scramble through hedges and ditches and endless fields — and a fortuitous stumble into a traveller camp. Followed by the goodwill of a kindly stranger, and my mother — finally — telling the police I’d been found.
It sounds like something from Enid Blyton, and it was clearly a very big deal at the time. But like many childhood experiences, it became just a tale I told.
What I didn’t realise, for many years, was how much it had shaped me.
For most of my young and adult life, I hated going anywhere unless either I, or the people I was with, knew with absolute certainty how to get back again.
Climbing Spanish hills, walking in the Lake District, snowy scrambles in the foothills of the Alps — I would still go. But if it seemed the other person didn’t know the way, and more importantly didn’t seem that bothered about being lost, I’d begin to feel unsafe. Anxious. Irritable. Upset. To varying degrees, depending on who I was with and how far I felt from safety.
It culminated in a rather spectacular panic attack on a muddy hillside in Wales.
Curiously, what didn’t occur to me for many years was to learn how to find my own way. To take responsibility for my own wayfinding — my own sense of safety.
It wasn’t until my late forties that my growing desire for inner and outer freedom led me to download a map app and start going on walks alone in beautiful places. Slowly learning to trust that I would get my Self home.
More recently, at the tail end of a solo retreat where I’d been walking a stretch of the South Coast path, I was lying in the sand dunes — claiming a last hour before heading home — when the following words landed within me:
I will find my way.
Whoompf.
It felt huge.
At first I couldn’t understand why. I mean, I’m pretty good at finding my way these days.
Then I realised I had been feeling a little lost about a significant piece of work I was creating — having previously felt absolutely clear.
It’s normal, of course, to feel doubt where there was once certainty. Part of our humanness is how different parts of us can hold apparently paradoxical thoughts at the same time.
And of course, we have all felt lost at times — uncertain how to approach something, or whether what we are doing or creating is really the best next step.
But sometimes these experiences run deeper.
Lying in those dunes, it dawned on me that the experience of being lost as a seven-year-old in the English Fens may have influenced me throughout my life in more ways than I had imagined — its tendrils shaping some of my ways of being and relating to the world.
The fear of being physically lost is an easy one to trace.
But there is an existential aspect to fearing lostness that can quietly shape how we show up.
I recognised that:
I had held an unconscious belief throughout my corporate career that I was best suited to being the right-hand person, aligning myself with brilliant leaders because I trusted they would know the way.
When in doubt, I often listened more deeply to other people’s voices — powerful others — rather than trusting my own still, quiet voice.
I repeatedly sought partnerships and collaborations, despite almost instantly regretting them, because I wasn’t sure I could move forward alone.
There’s a theme.
And the most astonishing thing is that I hadn’t fully seen it until now.
The irony is that I also know I used to present as a very confident woman. This inner uncertainty — this fear of being lost — feels at odds with how I suspect others experienced me.
My time in those dunes showed me, once again, how deeply these old stories can travel within us.
Exploring the stories and patterns that entwine us — this is the work I do with others. Helping people see what swims beneath the surface, and how to disentangle themselves from stories and strategies that may no longer serve them.
As we do the deep inner Work, the gentle unlayering supports both our conscious and unconscious disentangling. We don’t simply do the Work to see the stories — the Work helps us see the stories, and then we can choose how we wish to move forward.
And no matter how much Work we have done, there is always something new to notice, something fresh to understand. It’s part of what makes this process of deepening self-awareness with profound self-compassion so endlessly fascinating.
Those words from the dunes still resonate within me:
I will find my way.
They help that little girl inside me understand, at last, that we always will.