She Was Never Really Lost

Isis, wholeness, and finding the parts of yourself again

For much of my life, especially my younger years, I felt like something within me was missing, that there was more to me than what I was living. I yearned for more joy, more creativity, and more freedom. Really, more of me.

I couldn’t name what I’d lost, only that it wasn’t part of me. It seemed as though parts of myself had slipped beyond my reach, leaving behind a sense of emptiness and absence.

For years, I believed the problem was me. That I was flawed, broken, or somehow lacking what other people seemed to possess naturally. I never considered any other possibility. I often felt disconnected from myself, as though I couldn’t reach the person I was meant to be.

What if the parts of myself I missed weren’t gone at all?

Losing Parts of Myself

Throughout my life, I’ve cut off pieces of myself that didn’t fit my family’s or society’s expectations. To survive, I buried myself, my desires, my hopes, and my dreams. I hid the qualities and talents unwanted by others in the deepest recesses of myself, so deep that I couldn’t access them. I silenced my voice and ignored my needs so I wouldn’t disturb anyone or interfere with what they were doing. Wholeness was an ideal I yearned for, but I saw too many of my flaws, imperfections, and weaknesses to ever feel like I could be whole.

But alone, in the quiet dark, I sensed something missing within me and that I was more than what I was currently living. I grieved for what I could have been and for my lost self.

Believing I Was Broken

I’ve always hated things like personality tests, journal prompts, or job interviews that asked, “What are your strengths?” It felt impossible for me to see anything good about myself or anything I did well.

For many years, looking in the mirror, I saw a monster, with only flaws and imperfections. My weaknesses of being petty, a bit vindictive, and jealous outshone any good qualities I might have had. My “teasing” leaned toward being cruel and hurtful, rather than fun or light-hearted. Anger filled me, and rage burned under the surface of my skin, ready to erupt at any perceived slight. I hated being alive and deeply believed I was a waste of resources: food, water, air, etc.

I admired other women’s joyfulness and ability to laugh and have fun, because it’s something I wanted to do, but didn’t feel like I could. When I was about 14, some dude I had a crush on told me I had a horrible laugh. It wasn’t feminine enough or some other bullshit. But I took it to heart and didn’t laugh much, afraid I’d offend someone with it. I looked on with envy as one of my cousins played with enthusiastic, boisterous fun with her kids. My mother abhorred rambunctious, active play, judging and punishing me if my play exceeded her requirements of quiet, subdued activity.

The Parts I Learned to Hide

All my life, I craved being artistic and creative. As a young girl, I fell in love with writing stories. I still remember the premise of a story I wrote in the third grade. Although my mother taught 7th and 8th grade English, she didn’t support or encourage my writing. Rather, she told me writing, or anything creative, couldn’t support me financially, and that I needed to have a “real job.” So when I went to college, instead of majoring in creative writing, which is what I wanted, I went into accounting. It was practical.

I expressed my creativity through handicrafts such as sewing, crocheting, knitting, or embroidery. Those were acceptable ways because they produced something useful, either as clothing or for the home. My parents didn’t encourage things like drawing, painting, or even coloring because they weren’t a “productive” activity.

Piece by piece, I learned to distrust the parts of myself that felt most alive. Looking back now, it’s difficult for me to revisit those years and remember how deeply I hated myself. I’ve worked hard over the last thirty years healing those wounds and uncovering who I really am under all that conditioning. Returning to those feelings and the memories of that version of myself is painful, but it reminds me how much I’ve changed.

Beginning the Search

After being excommunicated from the Mormon church and moving from Utah to Southern California, the emptiness within me pushed me to search to be more than I’d been. I didn’t like who my conditioning and parental judgments forced me to become. I wanted to be a better, happier person, and under the surface, I sensed her waiting for me to find her.

My search led me to Goddess Spirituality, and I began a quest to find the missing parts and pieces of myself. I yearned for wholeness as more than an unobtainable ideal. Although I didn’t know what I was looking for, I knew something inside me recognized the possibility that I wasn’t broken after all. I wanted to find a way to see myself differently. More than anything, I wanted to understand how to find myself again.

Meeting Isis

One of the first Goddess I learned about was the Egyptian Goddess Isis. Her story of searching for her husband’s body parts after his murder stuck with me. Osiris’s resurrection didn’t intrigue me; however, Isis’s relentless determination to find his missing pieces did. Isis holding the vision of his wholeness so completely that she conceived a son with him, even without his phallus, spoke to me.

As I searched and found more of my hidden self, I began to understand why Isis’s story affected me so deeply. The metaphor of being seen as whole before I could see myself that way touched a place in my soul I yearned for.

Over and over, I felt Isis held a vision of my wholeness for me, even when I felt broken and unloved. She wrapped me in her wings of unconditional love, holding not only my wholeness but also my holiness close to her heart, waiting for me to see and accept it. Isis helped me understand on a more visceral level that at our core being we are divine and holy. Although our bodies are mortal, our souls, our inner being, are immortal. Even when it appeared I’d been chopped into many pieces and scattered in the wind; those aspects were always part of me and I could reclaim them. Once I began to understand that, I could never look at myself in quite the same way again.

Reclaiming What Was Hidden

This truth guided me like a beacon as I searched for all the parts and pieces of myself I’d hidden or cut away. Each piece I gathered and reclaimed brought me closer to who I truly was. My love of writing. My laughter and joy of having fun. My creativity. These parts of me I thought I’d lost were waiting for me to recognize and embrace them. What I’d spent years searching for wasn’t somewhere outside me, but rather a process of recovering lost parts of myself. As I reclaimed those pieces, I began noticing a pattern.

In my healing journey, I began asking a different question: Is this actually true for me, or was it something I’d been taught to believe? Those that weren’t mine, such as being shy, I healed and allowed to flow away from me. Others remained because they felt deeply true. Slowly, I began to recognize my good qualities, such as my kindness, generosity, and boldness. I learned how to treat people—including myself—with compassion and love. None of this happened overnight.

Over the past twenty-plus years, I’ve done intense inner healing, exploring and using countless healing and transformation modalities: Holodynamics, Psych-K, EFT, meditation, ritual work, archetypes, and many others.

A Different Kind of Healing

An unexpected turn along that journey—and a pivotal moment in my life—came in 2009. I quit my six-figure CFO position. I thought I’d easily find another accounting job because I was an excellent accountant. But the economy crashed at the same time, and my resume went into the cyber void. I had to accept that part of my life—and my identity—was over.

Since then, I’ve turned inward, making my healing, my self-discovery, and learning who I was at my core, inner being, and what was true for me my “job”. I studied my human design, which helped me understand myself better, and my past started making sense.

Over the years, each time I removed a piece that didn’t fit and replaced it with one that did, I became more whole. Not completely, but enough that I could accept my holiness, that I am divine. Although I’d reclaimed many parts of myself by then, something deeper remained unresolved.

What Still Remained

But even then, fury continued to burn beneath the surface of my skin. I raged at being alive, at not knowing what my purpose or my reason for being in this incarnation was. About two years ago, I had a profound spiritual experience and vision that resolved some deeply rooted betrayals and disintegrated the chains that had held me down. My path lit up before me. Shortly after, my gallbladder became infected—overnight—and I had to have it removed. Instead of going into surgery filled with fear and anxiety, I held a deep certainty that it was the right thing for me. I knew it was something I needed done, not just for my physical health, but also for my spiritual well-being. Although I couldn’t explain why, I felt something far older was ending than a simple infection.

The Turning Point

I came out of surgery feeling incredibly free. All the rage and anger I’d held my entire life was gone. My skin no longer burned with suppressed fury, waiting to explode. In its place, I felt deep, dark joy—the bliss and contentment of knowing all is well, no matter what. I don’t know how to explain it, but this incident was a major turning point in my life. One where I feel like I’m a completely different person than who I’d been growing up. I’m happy and at peace with myself and my life in a way I haven’t been since I was a small child.

I finally feel whole, complete, even holy. Even though I’m not perfect, and not every wound has healed or disappeared, I can feel this way because I no longer believe I’m defined by my missing pieces. Perhaps that was what Isis had been showing me all along.

Held Whole All Along

Isis held me throughout my journey to find myself. Through all the trials and difficult times, through the heartache of healing past trauma and betrayals, she was there. She reminded me at each step of my journey that I wasn’t broken, and that my missing pieces were only hidden, not gone.

For much of my life, I believed wholeness was an ideal, something beyond my flaws, imperfections, and wounds that I could never achieve. What I’ve come to understand is that wholeness was never absent.

The parts of myself I searched for weren’t lost. My laughter. My creativity. My voice. My capacity for joy. They’d been hidden beneath years of conditioning, fear, judgment, and survival, but they remained part of me all along.

Isis held me through that remembering. She saw my wholeness long before I could see it myself. She reminded me, again and again, that what I’d buried I could reclaim, and that what I’d hidden was never gone.

Perhaps that is the deeper gift of her story.

Not that she gathered together the lost pieces.

But that she never stopped believing she could find them.

As I wrote this essay, I found myself thinking about all the parts of myself I believed were gone forever. The things I missed, grieved, judged, or assumed I’d lost somewhere along the way. Looking back, many of them had never disappeared at all. They’d simply been buried beneath expectations, conditioning, fear, and the choices I made to survive.

Perhaps there are parts of you that have been waiting to be seen again as well.

1. What parts of yourself have you learned to hide, downplay, or dismiss in order to fit someone else’s expectations?

2. Is there something about yourself that you’ve always assumed was a flaw or weakness? What happens if you become curious about where that belief came from?

3. If the parts of yourself you’ve been grieving were not actually lost, what might they be waiting for you to remember?

Continue Exploring with Isis

If something in this essay resonated with you, Isis’s Sacred Love offers a way to continue the exploration through relationship and devotional practice.

Through time with Isis, the Guide invites you to consider love beyond the familiar ideas of self-love. You’ll explore acceptance, belonging, reclaiming the parts of yourself you may have hidden or set aside, and what it means to recognize your wholeness.

There isn’t one right answer or a particular place you need to arrive. The Guide offers different ways to spend time with Isis, reflect on your own experience, and discover what becomes visible for you.

I invite you to join the conversation on my Substack, Lunar Ink & Alchemy, to share your experience and insights from reading this essay.