If you happen to be an existential nomad, I want your story! Many artists are!

I’m gathering real-life stories for a new book exploring an increasingly common human experience: the life of the existential nomad.

An existential nomad is not someone who travels the world, but someone who cannot permanently inhabit any single version of themselves.

Roles, identities, beliefs, careers, relationships—even deeply held self-definitions—eventually stop fitting. What once felt true begins to feel provisional, and a shift—chosen or forced—follows. If you recognize yourself in this, you may be living an existentially nomadic life.

You may have:

• Moved through multiple careers, identities, or belief systems without ever feeling finally “arrived”
• Outgrown roles that once defined you, without a clear sense of what replaced them
• Felt fatigued from having to continually make meaning
• Experienced periods of starting over—internally or externally—more than once
• Felt both the freedom and the overwhelm of having to reinvent yourself multiple times
• Struggled to tell yourself a coherent life story because so many chapters no longer seemed to belong to the same person
• Experienced a subtle but persistent sense that no identity you’ve occupied is fully or permanently “you.”

This is not a call for dramatic stories only. In fact, I am especially interested in the ordinary, lived experience of this condition—the ways it shows up in daily life, relationships, work, creativity, and meaning-making.

You do not need to have a theory about it. You do not need to frame your experience in philosophical language. You only need to describe what it has felt like to live a life in which identity feels fluid, provisional, or repeatedly up for revision and where meaning had to be repeatedly made and remade.

All stories will be treated with care and respect. You may share anonymously if you prefer. Selected stories may be included (with your permission) in the forthcoming book Existential Nomads, to help illustrate this experience for others who are living it but may not yet have language for it. If you’d like to share your experience, please drop me a line to ericmaisel@hotmail.com and I’ll send along further instructions.

Your voice may help name something that many people are living but few have been able to articulate. Existential nomad. Does that ring a bell <smile>?