Losing My Role - Finding My Soul

The year my body gave out, everything I thought I knew about myself unraveled. I had been strong, capable, admired for my work, respected for my drive. My identity was woven into my ability to produce, to achieve, to hold myself together. And then, almost overnight, it was gone.

Illness has a way of stripping you bare. One day I was moving through the world with purpose, the next I was unable to do the very work that had defined me. The loss was not only physical—it was existential. Without my work, who was I?

I sat in that silence and asked a question I had avoided my whole life: Who am I now, without the roles and achievements that once defined me?

At first, all I felt was emptiness. The applause stopped. The recognition disappeared. Friends and colleagues moved on with their busy lives, while I was left staring at a ceiling, wondering if my life had any meaning without my work to prove it. It felt like invisibility. It felt like erasure.

But slowly, something else began to happen. When I could no longer perform, I had no choice but to meet myself as I was. Beneath the exhaustion, beneath the grief, beneath the shame of no longer being “useful,” I began to sense a different presence—a quieter, deeper self that had always been there, waiting.

I picked up the brushes and paints that had been waiting at the edges of my life for years. My body was weak, my future uncertain, but when the color touched canvas something shifted. A flicker of vitality moved through me. Creativity didn’t ask me to be strong or accomplished. It simply welcomed me as I was.

As I kept creating, I began to realize it wasn’t just about healing my body or lifting my spirit. Creativity was giving me a deeper experience of myself. Each color revealed an emotion I had buried. Each brushstroke showed me a piece of my truth. The canvas became a mirror, reflecting not the roles I had lost, but the soul I had forgotten.

It is a vulnerable thing, to face yourself without the shields of work or achievement. At first, it feels unbearable, as if the ground beneath you has vanished. But if you are willing to stay with it—to breathe, to create, to listen—something extraordinary begins to happen. A truer self emerges. A self not defined by what she accomplishes, but by who she is in her essence.

So many of us arrive at this threshold, though the circumstances differ. For some, it is illness. For others, divorce, retirement, or loss. Whatever the doorway, the feeling is the same: the old roles fall away, and we are left wondering if there is anything left of us at all.

What I have learned is this: there is always something left. In fact, what remains is often the most important part of us—the self that was buried beneath years of striving. The self that knows her own worth, not because of what she does, but because of who she is.

If you are standing in that place now, know that you are not alone. Sit in the silence. Pick up something that sparks your creativity. Let it guide you deeper into yourself.

Sometimes, what feels like the end is the invitation to finally become who you were always meant to be.

DK Hillard