How I Coped with Feeling Lost in a Changing Society

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by Lea Misan

Feeling lost in a changing society is like arriving in a once-familiar town. You think you should know where you are and where to go, but you need a map – which you don’t have – to find your way. 

Feeling lost can feel as if you are untethered, drifting. If we feel lost, it is that we are untethering ourselves from a conception of the world that is no longer relevant to us but has not yet found a new conception to anchor our lives to. 

A time of potential 

This is why feeling lost points to a time of potential if only we can hold the hope along with the discomforting fear. Be confident, even as, at times, we give in to despair. 

I was like Pollyanna, always looking for the positive side of things. I operated in the world as I wanted it to be. This comes at a cost: I was (constantly) marginalizing the signals that pointed to unsavory but needed information. I remember marginalizing a feeling that there was something antisemitic about the way I was being spoken to. A feeling I quickly shut down and sent deep into my unspoken realms, because it didn’t go along with my reason for joining the learning community I was a part of and its professed values of diversity and inclusion. 

I was left feeling lost as in a fog, unable to understand what transpired, moment to moment. The feedback I received was accurate but also unhelpful. I was told I came across as distant, half in and half out. As Pollyanna, I couldn’t quite fathom how. At the time, I had no way of responding to what felt like an accusation. There were moments of deep despair, alongside other moments of high hope. I felt numb, even nauseous at times, lost in a feeling I could not describe, that I had no language to describe. Today, as I look back, I recognize my wobbling, testing out the waters, then sheltering back in my best-of-all-possible-worlds cocoon.

I waited for signals that the world was joining my conception of it, that those who I considered friends would share my map and we would know where we were again. That was not to be. I waited for two years. I would invite them to join me. They were suspicious and stayed away.

Inviting the support we need 

In process work we often go in our minds to a place in nature or invite a supportive figure, naming the figure and inviting it to help us gather parts and see what happens. But most often, these dream figures remain private, they are part of our inner world.

We seek and give support to one another daily, and yet, so often, the support we receive is not the support that we seek. The support that we offer does not quite meet the needs of the one we offer it to. Support is a blank access term that means so many things to each of us, that we often answer the call of another with our own needs. Sometimes, we answer their call with the fear of what that means in terms of relationships. In fact, not wanting a relationship because ‘*my plate is full*’, we stopped being related.

Gathering support figures 

So, faced with this dilemma, I did something that, for me at least, was quite extraordinary. Still feeling lost, I decided one day to create what I called for myself a Chalk Circle, inspired by a dance performance of Bertold Brecht’s play, ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’, which I had seen decades earlier in Jerusalem. 

I would gather my supporting figures – my outer support figures, friends in my life who support me – and, together, we would create an orienting Chalk Circle. I invited a select few, with an undertaking that if they accepted my invitation, I would be specific as to the support I would like from them and the quality of their presence that I value. I committed to asking how I, in turn, could be of support to them and that I would endeavor to do so. In my invitation, I told them that sometimes, it takes the combined skills of a whole and diverse community to notice what we marginalized and transform our age-old patterns. With their support, I felt able to do what otherwise I would be incapable of doing.

There are moments we can sometimes point to when an internal switch is turned and everything changes. It turns out that transforming our age-old patterns transforms our place in the world. Suddenly the veil is lifted and we can notice other signals as well. My invitation to my Chalk Circle was such a moment for me. I started to feel less lost in the world, as I tapped into the hope, the possibility of creating in this way, the community I had been looking for.

Your values can help you navigate a path. Your dreams can help orient where your values are to take you but to cope with feeling lost in a changing society dreaming the future into being is an act we cannot do alone: we need supportive figures to witness our feelings and acknowledge our power.

Tips for Chalk Circling

1. Spell out what you would like support for. 
2. Your Chalk Circle reflects back its appreciation for the task / wish dream you called out for them to support. 
3. What is the support that you need?  
4. Some of those present might want to reflect back on how they might be that support.
5. What are ways you can ask for that support out in the world? 
6. Your Chalk Circle might respond with ways in which you can ‘take the support that you need’
7. What do you need for your learning?
8. What is the next step you would like to take and how will your Chalk Circle be of support? 

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