Finding Yourself Again After a Siloed Relationship

I took a golf lesson yesterday morning, and something cracked open in me. For the first time in a long time, I felt like myself.

It reminded me of how I used to feel doing CrossFit, that feeling of doing something purely for me, in my own body, on my own time, for no one else. (I can't do CrossFit anymore because of my health, and I've grieved that.) But standing out there yesterday, I felt that same thing come back to life. This is mine. I'm doing this for me.

And it made me realize how long it had been since I'd felt that at all.

How you lose yourself in a silo

Here's what happens when you're the anxious partner in a siloed relationship, especially when you're the one putting in all the effort:

You start disappearing.

Slowly, without even noticing, your whole life reorganizes around them. Your free time goes to seeing them, driving to them, waiting for them, thinking about them. Your hobbies fall away because there's no time left. The things that used to be yours, the ones that made you feel alive and whole and independent, quietly go dormant.

And then something dangerous happens: you become dependent on the relationship for your happiness. Not because you're weak, but because you've slowly given away all the other sources of joy in your life. When they're the only thing you have left that lights you up, of course losing them feels like losing everything. You built a life with a single point of failure, and that point is a person who keeps you on the porch.

I spiraled at the end of mine. Badly. And a big part of why is that I had nothing else to hold onto, I'd let him become my whole world, so when the world got shaky, I got shaky. There was no solid ground underneath me that was just mine.

The hard truth: sometimes you have to leave to come back to yourself

Here's the part that sucks, and I won't pretend otherwise: sometimes the only way to find yourself again is to walk away. Sometimes you have to break up to get your life back.

Because when you're that enmeshed, you can't just add a hobby back in and fix it. The whole structure of the relationship, the effort imbalance, the porch, the way it eats your time, is what buried you in the first place. So distancing yourself, and sometimes leaving entirely, is what finally gives you the room to breathe and remember who you were before them.

It's painful. But on the other side of it is you. The you who has her own mornings, her own joys, her own solid ground.

Making time for yourself is a boundary

Here's what I want you to take from this, and it's the whole point:

Making time for yourself is not selfish. It's a boundary. And it's one of the most important ones you can have.

The feeling I had at that golf lesson, "I'm doing this just for me", that is how you're supposed to feel, not just in a hobby, but in your life while you're in a relationship. A healthy relationship has room for you to be a whole person with your own things. You don't lose yourself in it. You bring a full self to it.

The trouble is, in a siloed relationship, you almost never get that, especially if you're the one carrying all the effort, because then there's simply no time left over for you. And that's exactly how the codependency takes root.

So if you want to protect yourself from ending up siloed and codependent, start here: keep the things that are yours. Guard your time. Protect the hobbies, the friendships, the mornings that belong only to you. Not as an afterthought you'll get to once the relationship is settled, but as a non-negotiable, all the way through.

Because the version of you that has her own life, her own joy, her own solid ground? She's much harder to silo. She doesn't need someone else to be her whole happiness. And she knows, deep down, that she can walk away from anything that asks her to disappear, because she's got a whole self waiting on the other side.

Go find the thing that makes you feel like you again. Even one thing. It's the beginning of finding your way home.

If you've lost yourself and don't know how to find your way back, therapy is where I started remembering who I was. Check out my support page for therapy platforms and resources to help you get started.