How to let go: when holding on hurts more

I am finding that this season of my life is demanding I learn how to let go. Things I wasn’t prepared to let go of:

a job, a comfy, codependent relationship, a sense of security, the ease of grocery shopping without covering my face…

But I’m giving in a little more each day. And by “giving in,” I mean I’m coping. I’m praying “Thank you” to God instead of “Can you please bring this back to me? I think you messed up…”

I’ve even been able to ask myself if these things were even good for me before they were stripped away. This is a laboring task, but I believe it’s something everyone needs right now, if even a small dose. 

Being introspective can be exhausting. It takes an incredible amount of honesty and vulnerability. Excavating one’s life tends to be a messy proposition.

If Letting Go were a superhero, Nostalgia would be kryptonite. 

Nostalgia is a powerful yet unproductive reminder of how much changes over time. It can sneak up and grab you by the shoulders while you thought you were finally moving on from a painful experience or loss. This is what makes letting go so difficult.

I’ve been in situations I knew deep down I needed to get out of, that were dead or slowly dying or just plain rotten, but then nostalgia came with a “Remember when things were good, though?”

And and with a familiar smell, sight, or place, Nostalgia said, “This’ll take you back to that beautiful memory you had with _____. You should call them!”

And at that moment, it’s really difficult to say “No” to that inner voice. And many times I’ve messed up and had to start all over with the process of letting go.

I consider what I’ve learned about how to let go in the past.

A few years ago a friend told me something while tossing pebbles into the Sound together. He had run into my ex’s mother months before, and she had referred to me as a “miserable b–ch.” 

He said he had told her he’d never seen that side of me and thought I was a great girl. I wasn’t sure what his motivation or reasoning was for admitting to me what she’d said. I didn’t bother asking how I was brought up in conversation between two people standing in line for cold cuts. 

It didn’t matter. 

Time has a way of ushering us to move on. It had been over a year since I saw my ex. I was still in the process of letting go of pain and post-trauma that spawned from that toxic relationship. The work was as difficult and uncomfortable as the emotional scars that were left. 

But as my friend and I started talking about what led up to the split, after disappearing from him and almost all of my other once-close friends, those words– “miserable b–ch” –started running through my mind. 

I’ll admit, it hurt at first. I got that sinking feeling in my chest, like it was full of the water we were staring into then. Like I could feel each rock against my rib cage as I hurled it into the salty waves ahead.

I had to ask myself, Why? Why after all this time and water under a rotting bridge did I care even a little? 

That relationship was a whirlwind. But I had once thought of that woman as a second mother. We’d hang out at the kitchen table deep into the early morning hours. We ate pasta and talked about everything and nothing. She knew some of my most personal secrets.

Looking back now, I wonder what about her as a person, outside of being a mother, made me so trusting. Who was I then to trust myself?

I decided not to talk about that pain just then. And I pushed it down while instead letting hateful words about her and her son fall out of my mouth. I wasn’t much better than her in that moment. 

How many times have you stayed silent when you should have been voicing your pain?

How many times have you found yourself in the shadows of a well-lit room just to make space for someone who put you there?

Part of letting go is addressing your fear. Bringing to light everything other people urge you to hide. 

Then the triggers started firing hard. And I thought about it all night after that. I knew if I didn’t stop it, I’d start spiraling into the thoughts, “What could I have done to prevent A, B, C?” The rabbit hole was opening up right before me. 

We all know that feeling of temporary regret

That: Maybe if I just sucked it up and pretended to love the job, I would have learned to love it. Was it the right choice? That: If I just kept that to myself, we wouldn’t have fought and maybe we’d still be together. 

Back-tracking is a dangerous spiral. 

If you become complacent “pretending” to love something or someone, you may actually convince yourself that you actually do. The human brain is not equipped to work against your own irrational thoughts. It lets them exist and even get comfy.

Regrets are illusions. They convince you that you can trace events by every choice you made or didn’t make. That you could’ve controlled the outcome if only you did this or that. Guilt and regret are heavy emotions that pile up each time you criticize yourself for past mistakes. 

It’s suffocating, when time-travel is impossible and you need to find another way to move on rather than fantasizing about what could’ve been.  It’s incredibly difficult to face these emotions. It’s equally difficult to let them go. The gray of regret easily becomes the black hue of despair. 

Not this time!

Instead of spiraling into dark places, I reflected

After a long drive over the lit-up bridge near my apartment, blasting Black Sabbath with the windows down, after sucking down a cookie dough-with-peanut-butter-cup Blizzard, after digging through old photos I hadn’t yet deleted– after facing the pain head on, I chose to instead set a clear path out. 

Once the pain passed and the memories like a deck of cards shuffled through my mind, I really considered her words and what my position was in that moment. 

I realized– and perhaps this is the writer in me — this truth:

You are not the protagonist in someone else’s life.   

I chose to see her words not as a reflection of myself, but rather as who I was to her. It freed me from feeling more pain. I left her words at baggage claim and only took on my own; it’s work enough to carry your own pains let alone carrying someone else’s on top of it. 

Now we have arrived. 

This is an act of letting go. And it may seem simple. People will say, “If you don’t care what anyone else thinks of you, you’ll be better off.” But that’s cliche and always easier said than done– which is another cliche. Don’t go down that hole, either. 

It hurts when you learn that you were not a positive presence in someone else’s life. 

But there is always a choice to make in that moment. You either spend your energy trying to convince that person you aren’t who they think you are, or you let it go and accept that you cannot please everyone.

And that you can’t even be considered a good person to everyone.

What will further defending who you are as a person do for your own soul? Why should you feel the need to pitch yourself to someone who’s already chosen to pass on your offer? 

Relationships are about perception. And perception shapes reality.

While I was writing my memoir, I took a trip to Oregon for a writers’ conference. I sat in on every memoir-writing workshop, lecture, and panel I could squeeze myself into. During one of my favorites, one of the panelists said this:

“Your characters are not real people; they are your projections of real people.”

It’s amazing the power of one line. This opened every door I needed to write my characters more honestly and fully. I realized it wasn’t about them, but rather my own truth in who they’ve been in my life. What they represented to me. 

My own truth has taken a beating over the years. But now we’re on a first name basis.

That illusion of control: what happens when our control “bubble” pops.

We can control these things in our own lives: our perception of the world and other people. Our own actions, reactions, word choice, who and what we focus on. how we spend our time, the information we put out into the world;

And NOT: what others say and how they feel about us, the way we are perceived, the characters others define us as in stories where they are the main characters. 

My story was not and is not the same as my ex’s mother; my experience was not hers. That relationship with her son was traumatizing, toxic, and unfortunate. The person I was to her has no bearing on who I am. My narrative is my own.

Living your own truth is separate from trying to define others’ truths about you.

What are you struggling to let go of?

I think maybe, even though it was over a year after the breakup, I hadn’t fully let go of some residual anger and pain, not until after I found out about what my ex’s mother said. How would I know that? 

Because if I were truly over  it, her words would have gracefully fallen off me like a tiny drop of water that instead rippled into giant rings right where I was standing. 

I wanted to change the words she’d already spoken into existence. Not only is that impossible, but it’s a good way to deplete myself of energy I could be putting into something meaningful, like writing a motivational blog post!

What’s that loss you thought you let go of, but once in a while comes back to remind you you’re still carrying the pain of it? What’s the root of the regret or guilt you’d been living in before the world seemed to come to a halt, and you were left in the quiet to confront? Are you still living inside this illusion that you can control everything around you?  

What can you do?

When you’re struggling with how to let go of some hurtful thing someone has said to or about you, the reason for this can be that desire for controlling the situation. So, the first thing you can do is focus on what you can absolutely control: yourself.

Positive self talk is something I struggle with but have been diligently practicing. It’s all about hyping yourself up and combating the negative with positive affirmations that you are good, you are beautiful and hard-working, generous and weird-but-in-a-good-way, reaffirming that you will not give up. 

I try to say these things to myself everyday. It’s an effort to learn to cherish yourself as much as it is an opportunity to disallow yourself from believing something hurtful said by someone else. You begin to reclaim yourself. Hold yourself accountable.

When you’re working on letting go of a person but feel that powerful nostalgia penetrating the air like cologne fumes or the booming sound of their name dropped into a casual conversation, you can focus on remaining in the present.

Those triggered memories can exist where they belong: in the past. One thing I like to do to practice presence, especially when slapped in the face with triggering nostalgia, is create new relevance for these smells, sights, or sounds that exist right now, not then. 

Just like our taste buds change over time to prefer the taste of a food we once hated, we can rewire ourselves to find the newness in seemingly familiar things. This does not mean naming your new puppy after your ex– but who knows? Maybe in time…

What does it mean to truly “let go”? 

In my early teens, I was a softball fast-pitcher. When my parents saw that I was actually pretty good, they enrolled me in pitching lessons to make me great.

One of the strength training exercises my pitching coach implemented was a weighted vest attached to a long bungee cord that hooked me to the back wall. She’d have me pitch with this bizarre hook-up, over and over. The first few times, the kick-back on the bungee took me by surprise and pulled me back, off my feet, and onto the ground.

I repeated this drill until I had the strength to stand strong despite all the weight, and with the bungee cord stretching out across the room in defeat.

Then, we removed it all. “Now, pitch,” my coach said. 

I had gotten so used to having the extra weight and my body tethered to the wall that I didn’t even know my own strength and almost fell forward flat on my face at the end of my first pitch. Not only that, but the speed of the pitch itself was almost 4 miles per hour above what I’d been throwing before that. I felt stronger, faster, and more in control of my own body than ever. 

I think sometimes we tend to live our lives with all this extra weight, committed to holding onto our past, thinking it’s light enough to carry with us into our future.

But the weight is never meant to last forever. I believe that truly letting go is that feeling I had at the end of that new pitch– 

When you’re holding something so heavy that it knocks you to the ground when you try to step forward. While it rips you away from progress until you’re willing to work for it and stand tall. The instances you realize you can’t possibly know how strong you really are until you push through the pain and come out on the other side, weightless, light as a feather.

So whatever you are holding onto right now, whatever refuses to unleash you, I pray that you learn to let it go, gracefully and fully. 

Go, pitch.

Love,

Lee