elsewhere, someone wrote about this topic. empathy demanded a reply. perhaps other things had a part in it, but i choose to thank and honor empathy.
i wish i could say i knew the right words to help. but the only words i know are those that rise from my own experiences. and they often do not seem much help at all. still, i’ll share them. just in case they arrive with the grace of the multiverse and manage better than i, myself, ever could…
i have recently come out of a situation that sounds very similar to the one you describe. different circumstance, i’m sure, but the same themes.
i spent half of last year really holding tight to something that had shriveled and should have been released months ago.
i really thought if i tried hard enough, didn’t give up, didn’t give in, that, through force of strength and will to hope, i could make it be different.
but that was the problem. i wasn’t willing to just let it be what it was. i wasn’t willing to let myself be what i was. i kept picking at it, trying to shift it, trying to “improve” it. refused in every way, in every moment to see, accept, or understand that it was perfect and beautiful and a blessing just… the …. way… it… was.
and because of this, i killed it. smothered it. placed the weight of my desires and needs on it and it just couldn’t withstand the weight.
and even after that, when it was utterly shattered, i still refused to admit it. refused to accept it. kept trying. only then, not only was i trying to make it different, i was actively denying it was ruined.
all in the name of me. what i wanted. what i needed. what i thought was best.
i threw my hands up many times. swore i was done. raged over it. so much anger. so much hurt. i bled. often. messily. blamed myself. blamed everyone else. ran in circles tossing blame like confetti. there is always an excess of blame, isn’t there?
eventually, i realized it was shattered… that i could not make it whole again.
but that was just letting one thing go to replace it with another, because then i took chokehold on what it might have been and proceeded to beat myself and anyone else in range with it. flagellation. a whip of recrimination that i swung much too freely.
finally, when i was too bloodied and broken to raise the damn thing anymore, i figured out how to let that go.
but it was only to pick up something else. a small sliver of the shattered pieces… and, foolish human that i am… deluded and so often lost and in the midst of being so lost, wanting so much not to be… actually thought i would or could create it new and fresh and shining and perfect like it was… and that little sliver was somehow the way to manage it.
of course, i had never really let go of it at all, had i? no, of course not.
and for a short time, i set that littlest sliver that remained in crystal and insisted it was just the same as the whole it came from… and stubbornly set my mind to the delusion that i would slowly rebuild it all… from a speck of its ruins.
can you see how completely ignorant and foolish i was?
not because i’m a bad or evil person. not because wanting to restore things is bad. not because the wish to make something beautiful and perfect is bad.
i was ignorant and foolish because i never once fully admitted that my own need, desire, greed, and fear were what was getting in the way. and because i never admitted that the things i REALLY needed to let go of had nothing to do at all with that beautiful thing i shattered, they always had to do with me.
they had to do with the parts of me that were and in many ways, remain, unable to just let it be, and understand that, even when… especially when… i am lost and despairing, it is most important for me to remember the profound difference between the desire for the things *I* want and the simple perfection that is the way things are… and to remember also that the only reason i ever see it at all differently is because i’m still holding onto the idea that, somehow, what *I* want is more important than anything, anyone.
i will never have the beautiful thing i shattered. it is gone. a precious, unique thing that i destroyed out of foolishness, pride, anger, fear, and greed.
and the hardest learning of all arrived only shortly after that realization… i had thought to hold onto its memory. to keep at least that one thing to look at and smile for and use as a point of reference…. Polaris… when there was no land to be seen in any direction.
but to let something go is not to remember it. to truly let something go is to let it go so completely that you don’t even hold it in your mind. it doesn’t mean i never think about it. but it does mean that i give it nothing more or less than what it now is… a dot on a much larger map… one more marker of a place where i made poor choices.
the map may be one color by the time i’m done. but here, now, there is still uncolored space. and here, now, i’m willing to let that dot be what it is in the hope that it might mean i avoid doing it again.
maybe none of this will make any sense. maybe it’s just jibbering. to be sure i can’t say i know anything longer than an instant. and i’m still wondering how long i will remember even this. but… i do know one thing… i know that, at least in this moment, at least for this one experience, i have, at last, truly, learned how to let it go.