Oh the pain of being in the wilderness. Dana Candler pens the experience perfectly that I've been having lately in her book Deep Unto Deep:

"We are trading in what we have always known and what others have always told us of ourselves for a book of blank pages. We leave all the old voices, however true or false, for the One voice who is temporarily very silent in our experience. He shows us so little of who we are in Him in the beginning because He wants us to experience the 'drop off' from the old ways and be willing to plunge into the unseen realm with eyes of faith. We face the pain of the barrenness of our souls. We face the reality of all that we do not yet know of Him when we once thought we knew so much. We spend a season in this dangling-in-between place--no longer identified as we once were, yet still so foreign and distant from who we truly are in Him and our eternal identity." (144-145)

I couldn't have said it better.