Did I get you thinking about letting go at all? I hope so. If not, maybe today’s post will do the trick. I want to talk today about situations that ultimately require the art of letting go. Maybe some that demand it, for our sanity, our sense of self-preservation. Remember at the end of yesterday’s post when I shared all the ways in which our society and our “teachers” and “leaders” reinforce the notion of hanging in there? I mean, let’s get real people. You don’t think our divorce rate would be staggeringly higher if people didn’t feel like failures when they let go of a relationship that don’t serve them? I do. Sure, people give up too easily on things, but that’s not about letting go. That’s just emotional laziness and that is a topic for another day.
I am talking about the fear of being the one to release your fingers when your grip has been iron tight for longer than you can remember. White-knuckles, if you will. I am talking about the idea of turning away from someone and walking in the other direction because that movement serves you far more than staying. Sticking it out. Standing in place.
I am going to start from the easiest place for me. Me. When I was in a relationship with my last ex, I felt like I had something to prove. I also felt like I was irreparably broken. Thus, my burning desire to blame everything on myself coupled with my need to not be the one to throw in the towel, led to an overstayed welcome and a broken heart that I unquestionably helped create. Sure, he stuck around too, but I can’t speak to why he didn’t leave. I only know why he finally left. For someone else. So perhaps he just needed a soft landing before he jumped? I’ll never know and I truly do not care. It doesn’t matter. The issue is not why he stayed, it is why I refused to let go. To leave. To release us both from purgatory.
Things were awful. He was constantly disappointed in me. He rejected me physically. He refused to communicate meaningfully about the things that I saw were broken between and around us. I could paint a sparkly picture with all of our travels and excursions and social events, but right under that glistening surface was the murkiest muck. Gross. Ugly. Deadly. I was unhappy but tried like hell to prove to him and myself and anyone around us that I wasn’t unhappy. Every single time something came up that challenged me or us, I found a reason why I was okay with it or why I should be okay with it. I’ll tell you something guys, my power to shape shift and manipulate my truth was actually terrifying. I don’t even recognize that person when I look back.
No physical relationship? Okay, well how shallow am I that I can’t just look beyond that and have a meaningful emotional connection? Frustrated at little things that made up the bigger picture of who I am? Well, isn’t a relationship about compromise? Why can’t I move the metric to be more flexible, more gracious? You get the picture or you want me to continue pummeling you with tales of my gratuitous dysfunction?
There was so much at play. In addition to those thoughts I just converted into speech bubbles for you, I had a history of failing at relationships. I hadn’t had a truly successful relationship thus far. I had been the reigning queen of roller coaster matches. Ups and downs. Ins and outs. I didn’t believe I was capable of maintaining a healthy relationship and given that I was inching towards my mid-30s (at the time), I was going to find that space, come hell or high water.
Okay, I said I was done with stories, but I think one more bears sharing. It was a snowy day in December and I broached the subject of our physical relationship after a failed attempt to not talk about it (if you know what I mean). Rather than having a meaningful discussion with me, my ex told me that if I wasn’t happy with him, then perhaps I should just leave, be done. Then he told me he was going to take me home. And he did. He drove me home in the snow. I cried the whole way home. I mean, let’s not get crazy. It was a couple of miles. I did that silent but messy crying thing. It was ugly. I trudged upstairs and sat, troubled, waiting for the anxiety to pass. No such luck guys. Not at all. In fact, I didn’t even allow the appropriate waiting period (I now know that it takes between two weeks and 30 days for that initial shitting anxiety feeling to pass) to set in. I pulled on my snow boots and walked back to his apartment. In the snow. I begged for forgiveness and promised to never mention such things again. Not for a while anyway.
And no, this isn’t one of those stories designed to illustrate the tough situations I faced in my time. This story is meant to make you feel a little queasy. A lot sad. Very motivated to figure your own shit out.
Let’s get to the summary part. The lesson bit. What does this mean in terms of my original point, which is when to let go? Okay. Here it is. It means that you have to let go when you get that feeling in your stomach that something is shitty or broken (or both). You have to let go when you have to compromise your fundamental values or beliefs or truest feelings to stay or keep hanging on. You have to let go when staying or hanging on means begging for another person’s attention, affection, or forgiveness (asking for forgiveness is different than begging—for another day). You have to let go when it feels shitty to do so, because everything worth doing in this life is hard. It is. I’m not going to sugar coat it for you. Everything that will take you to the next level and enrich you is going to rip your heart out at some point. It’s going to ask you to sweat and bleed. It’s going to demand that you are all in.
So, are you?
We’ll see….tomorrow (or thereafter).
L.
thepathtoworthy.com 