A few weeks ago, someone left this comment on one of my posts:

“That’s the problem. Finding yourself. So many people are looking for themselves instead of Jesus.”

I sat with that one for a while. Not because I was convinced, but because I recognized it immediately. I’ve heard some version of that sentence my whole life. I probably said it myself once, in a different decade, to someone I loved who was doing exactly what I’m doing now.

It sounds pious. It sounds like discernment. But underneath it is a false choice — as if self and God are two competing candidates for your attention, and every ounce you spend on one is stolen from the other. As if knowing yourself and knowing God are a zero-sum game.

I don’t believe that. And I think the belief itself has done real damage.

The Binary That Isn’t There

Here’s the assumption baked into that comment: that the self is a rival to God. That wanting to understand your own mind, your own history, your own wounds and desires and limits, is a kind of theft — energy diverted from where it belongs.

But if you grew up believing you were made in the image of something sacred, ask yourself what that actually implies. It means self-discovery isn’t a detour from the holy. It’s contact with it. You don’t bypass the divine by getting to know yourself more honestly. You find fingerprints of it.

The binary only holds up if you’ve already decided the self is inherently suspect — something to be managed, subdued, denied. And a lot of us were taught exactly that, so thoroughly and so early that it stopped feeling like a teaching and started feeling like truth.

The Command Assumes a Self

There’s a verse that gets quoted constantly in the very spaces that also teach self-erasure: love your neighbor as yourself.

Read that again. As yourself. Not instead of yourself. Not in spite of yourself. The command uses your own self as the unit of measurement — it assumes you have one worth referencing, one you know well enough to use as a baseline for how to treat another person.

If you’ve spent years being told to distrust your own instincts, deny your own needs, and treat your own perception as unreliable at best and dangerous at worst — what self is left to love your neighbor as? The commandment doesn’t work without a functioning self on the other end of it. Erase the self, and you don’t get more love. You get less, because there’s nothing left to draw from.

Self-Erasure Isn’t Devotion. It’s Compliance Training.

I want to be direct about something: teaching people to distrust themselves doesn’t produce holiness. It produces obedience.

A person who’s been taught, systematically, not to trust their own perception is a person who can’t reliably recognize when that perception is being violated. They won’t clock the manipulation. They won’t name the harm. They’ll doubt themselves before they doubt the authority figure, every time, because that’s the exact response the system was built to produce.

That’s not devotion. That’s control, dressed in the language of sanctification.

Look at the Fruit

I don’t think we have to argue about this in the abstract. We can just look at what self-abandonment actually produces, because the evidence is everywhere:

• People who stay in harmful marriages, churches, and families for years — sometimes decades — because they were trained not to trust their own instincts enough to act on them.
• “Service” with no boundaries, which doesn’t end in blessing. It ends in burnout, resentment, and eventually collapse.
• Depletion that gets mistaken for devotion, and praised publicly as a model to follow.

If a tree is known by its fruit, this tree is not producing love. It’s producing exhaustion and self-doubt in people who were told exhaustion and self-doubt were the price of faithfulness.

Reclaim the Phrase

“Finding yourself” gets mocked as vague self-help language — something for people with too much time and not enough depth. And sure, maybe it can be that.

But for someone who is leaving a system that treated their instincts as suspect by default, who was taught that their own perception couldn’t be trusted, who spent years performing a version of themselves that was easier for everyone else to manage — finding yourself is not indulgence. It’s excavation. It’s the slow, often disorienting work of uncovering what was buried alive, sometimes so long ago you forgot it was under there at all.

That is not a smaller project than following God. Depending on how you understand God, it might be one of the most direct ways to do it.

Your Healing Is Not Selfish

So here’s what I actually want to say to the person who left that comment, and to anyone who’s absorbed a version of it:

Your healing is not selfish. It is holy and sacred work.

Coming home to yourself — reconnecting with the parts of you that got exiled for being inconvenient, too loud, too needy, too much — isn’t a departure from love of neighbor. It’s the prerequisite for it. You cannot pour from a self you were never allowed to have. You cannot protect someone else’s dignity if you’ve never been permitted to notice your own.

Disconnection from self doesn’t make you more able to love the people around you. It makes you depleted, disoriented, and far more likely to either withdraw from people entirely or harm them without recognizing it — because you were never given the tools to recognize harm in the first place.

If you’re doing this work — if you’re slowly, carefully finding your way back to yourself after years of being told that self wasn’t safe to have — I want you to hear this clearly: you are not losing your faith. You are not choosing yourself over God. You are doing the work that makes it possible to actually love anyone well, starting with the person you’ve spent the longest time abandoning.

You’re not lost. You’re returning.

This piece goes with a carousel I posted this week — if you want the shorter, shareable version, you’ll find it on Instagram. New episodes of The Awakening Podcast drop weekly wherever you listen.