Relearning Who "Me" Is

MJ Wynn
Oct 7
2 min read

I miss me. Like—really miss me. My spark. My quirks. The way I used to light up in conversation or laugh too loudly at my own jokes. Somewhere along the way, I lost that version of myself, or maybe she just got buried under too much noise—too much survival. I feel like I have no outward personality most of the time, and it’s not that I don’t have one, it’s that I can’t seem to manifest it anymore. It’s like watching a TV with bad signal—you know something’s there, but it keeps cutting out.

I didn’t really see it until I moved in with my girlfriend. We’ve known each other since I was nineteen—back when my edges were still soft and my weirdness was something I wore proudly, like glitter eyeliner in the daylight. Before criticism made me shrink. Before “doing my best” stopped being enough. Before I got used to putting everyone else first, until I became a background character in my own damn life.

Now I catch myself comparing who I am to who I was—and wondering if she’s still in here somewhere, or if I have to build someone completely new from scratch. There’s this quiet little battle in my head: the part of me that aches to recover the old MJ, and the part that whispers maybe she’s gone for a reason. Maybe I get to start fresh. Maybe the next version of me will hold everything I used to love about myself and everything I’ve learned surviving what I’ve been through.

But then the question becomes… who is MJ? Who is Kass? Who do I want to be now that no one else gets to define it for me?

I tell myself all the time when I meet new people, “They don’t know who you were before—you could be anyone.” But then I freeze, because I don’t know who to be. Or how to start. Like, how do you “just be you” when you’ve forgotten who that even is?

Maybe that’s what this chapter is about though. The remembering. The reintroducing. The soft reconstruction of a person who got lost in the noise. Maybe “being me” right now just looks like being curious about myself again. Letting the little things feel like enough—the coffee I make exactly how I like it, the music I play too loud, the thoughts I’m brave enough to say out loud.