How We Drift From Ourselves Under Pressure

The Empty Road

Somewhere on I-89, driving through Vermont toward the New Hampshire line, the road went quiet in a way I had not felt in a long time. No cars in sight. The pavement smooth, the fields green on both sides, and for about five minutes I forgot which country I was in. It looked like Ireland — the motorway I used to drive years ago, heading out of Dublin in the early morning. I was on my way to Hampton Beach, to Ashworth by the Sea, where the sand runs for miles and the tide keeps its own time.

Something about the motion of a car loosens the mind. Thoughts surface on an open road that stay buried through a busy week, and I have learned to let them come. So I drove, watching Vermont turn into New Hampshire, taking in the green and the light and the strange gift of an empty road.

What Surfaced

It took me a few days to understand what the drive had been about. I had thought it was the scenery — the fields, the light, the road that looked like Ireland. It was not about the scenery at all. Underneath all of it, I was missing someone. And it took a while to understand who.

The Person I Missed

My first thought, on the road, had been that I missed the meditation teacher training I did in 2024 — the room, the practice, the graduation. But when I sat with the recording, I saw that the training was only the setting. What I missed was the version of myself I met there. For the length of the program, I was allowed to meet myself without judgment, without performing to be okay. The training was not the thing I longed for. The person I became inside it was.

I had not lost her to anything dramatic. I had simply stopped visiting.

The Slow Drift

The two years between then and now held a great deal. The end of a relationship, followed by the quiet discovery that I genuinely enjoyed being on my own. Releasing smoking, a surgery, and a recovery that asked more of me than I expected. Raising my grandchildren through all of it — one who writes, one who feels everything, one who wants to learn Irish dancing. Building a business from the ground up. And the ordinary, relentless pressure of holding it together on the days no one was watching.

Somewhere in that stretch, I picked up a habit I did not notice at first. I began comparing. I would see a couple who looked untroubled and feel the ache of my own regret — for the marriage I did not appreciate while I had it, for the version of my life I pictured other people living. Comparison has a way of narrowing your vision until the only thing you see is what is missing. And under that pressure, a quiet verdict settled into the background, the same one I carried for years at KPMG: I was not quite good enough. No one had to say it. It became a hum I stopped hearing, the way you stop hearing traffic when you live beside a highway.

When Judgment Gets Loud

We do not leave ourselves all at once. There is no single moment of departure, no door slamming. We drift, gradually, one pressured decision at a time, until one day the distance is wide and we are not sure how it grew.

What filled the space was judgment. Awareness notices. Judgment evaluates. One invites us to see clearly; the other rushes to a verdict. Under pressure, I had slowly begun listening to the louder voice.When the pressure rises, judgment wins the volume war, and we begin listening to the loudest voice instead of the truest one.

Then a subtler thing happens. We start to mistake our emotional weather for our identity. Sadness stops being something moving through us and becomes something we are. Regret stops being a passing state and becomes a verdict on our worth. I know this pattern well, because I lived inside it for a stretch of days before this trip — heavy, convinced the heaviness was who I had become, forgetting that a feeling is weather and not who I am.

Coming Home

I came home from the drive, set down my bags, and opened my laptop. There was an email waiting from davidji, who led that teacher training two years ago. He was inviting graduates to re-enroll and attend live again. The discount code was HOMECOMING.

I sat with it for a moment. Some things arrive with a timing so precise you stop trying to explain them and let them land. I had spent a drive through Vermont remembering the person I was when I first learned to meet myself, and the invitation to return was already in my inbox, named for the exact movement I had been making the whole way there.

The person I kept driving back toward was never gone. She had been there the whole time, underneath the comparison and the pressure and the noise, waiting for me to grow quiet enough to notice her again.

I used the code. I re-enrolled in the Masters of Wisdom meditation teacher training—not because I believed I needed to become someone new, but because I wanted to spend time with the person I had quietly stopped visiting.

Coming home, I understand now, is remembering who we are beneath the judgment, the comparison, and the noise—and meeting ourselves again with the same acceptance we so easily offer everyone else.

Since then, one question has stayed with me.  Who is the version of yourself you have quietly stopped visiting—and when did you last sit still enough to notice they never left?

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If you want to go deeper

If this is a pattern you recognize in yourself — a feeling quietly becoming the whole story — my book Inner Child Freedom goes deeper into where these patterns come from and how to meet them without losing yourself in them. There’s a free companion workbook as well. Grab the free workbook here.

Curious about your own decision patterns? Stress shapes not only how we respond but the choices we make. My free Decision Clarity Scorecard is a good place to start.

Want a weekly dispatch on performance, pressure, and the internal dynamics most people leave unspoken? The Clarity Brief goes out every Wednesday.

Also by Myriam: Holistic Vagus Nerve Reset, available on Amazon.