Losing - myself

Sounds like a contradiction, how can one lose oneself? After all, if anything is true, the mere fact of us being with ourselves is, so where does this notion of losing one's own self comes from? I am scared. I am fearful. I am petrified. I am forever wary of losing myself and now more than ever. The fact that we all are with our own selves is taken more for granted than anything else. We assume, no, we believe vehemently that we know who we are and what we want at any given time, that we have a working relationship with our inner cores, but, in reality, most of us are strangers to our selves. We have no inkling as to what we are from the inside, we are so busy in the business of living that we tend to lose touch with who we are from the inside. Here lies the fissure in a person's self. When we are distanced from our needs, our core-values, our beliefs, what we consider important, when we become too involved with 'having' than 'being,' when we have no time to give to our thoughts, when we ignore the inner dreams, when we strangle our emotions and feelings - we lose touch with who we are.

When we have been alone for a long part of our lives with only ourselves for company, when life has thrown us in solitude we are forced to acknowledge the fact that there is a duality in us, there is the 'I' in all of us, and then there is this other being observing that 'I.' Isn't that so? Don't we all think and then there is something apart and separate from our thoughts who knows that we are thinking and is aware of what it is. Is there then two beings in all of us? I don't know. What I do know is this - when the world is too much with me, the voices of my own selves (if there are such selves in me) gets muffled, I can't hear my own thoughts clearly, no, when I have too much input from the outside I cannot process anything, my mind refuses to function and goes under a fugue. I feel the more other people intrude my space of my person and my soul the less I am what I am. And what I fear the most is the evaporation, the sublimation of that I into what is around it.

Can getting close to another result in losing touch with oneself? What happens when the 'I' in us becomes fused with the 'I' in another? Is there a meeting point, without being overtaken by the other? for to lose oneself is the scariest of things.....and.....

....I cannot afford not lose myself again.....