I don’t think that I truly understand what it means to let go. I mean in all the way? Forever? I don’t know that I have ever let anything go, all the things, all at once. I can let go physically, that is the easiest. Just cut people out of my life and move on. I have a much harder time letting go of my thoughts about them. Those fuckers persist for years! And emotionally, letting go and moving on is so much harder. I have all these, what I now know to be dysfunctional emotional patterns and it is like some sort of spidery web from which I cannot extricate myself.
The more I think about it, the more I try not to think about it and so the more I think about it. And then, for me at least, it is the thoughts that create the emotions. Not the other way around. I have a thought, then much later I have a feeling. Then it is like the thoughts and feelings enter into some death spiral that threatens to take me or you out, or sometimes maybe both of us.
I think the only reason I am still here is because largely my fear of sharing any of this with you, the person I have pulled into my tightly wound death spiral, is too great. So I just go it alone, diving into the depths of my own heartbreak tornado of thinking and feeling.
And just before I hit the ground in some sort of great explosion of churning thoughts and out of control emotions, I let go and the parachute of salvation opens and I drift softly to Tierra firma and a safer, saner reality.
I think often that my emotional nature is this massive anvil that burdens me so. But in truth, it is my thoughts about my emotional nature that weigh me down and threaten to maim me. And these are the very things I have the hardest time letting go of...the thoughts. I live so much up in my head that the thought of letting go of all the things I think about, seems like asking me to amputate my right arm, without antiseptic or anesthesia. Um, no thanks.
Letting go for me is kind of like picking up after children...it is a process that is never done. They wake up and take out all the things and create disastrous messes and you follow behind cleaning it up all fucking day long, to no avail. They are always faster at the mess creating than you will ever be on clean up crew. Then they go down for a nap and you are like, “FINALLY, I can restore order!” And so you do, then they wake up from a nap and the whole process starts over again...forever. Until they grow up and move out and sometimes even then.
This is what letting go feels like to me. This endless continuum of work. I let it go and I think I am done, but suddenly, without warning there I am again, in the midst of something I let go of weeks ago, picking it back up only to know that I am just going to have to let it go again! It is exhausting.
And that is how I feel about this relationship that has consumed my heart, my body, my mind and spirit for the last two years. I just keep letting it go and it keeps beckoning me back in and I keep going back in thinking that somehow I will be able to right what always seems to go so horribly wrong.
Today, as I lie in bed, tapping out all my thoughts as if I can forever prisoner them to the screen, like this placing of them here will keep them from making me make mistake number 2,304,594. I know it won’t and yet here I am trying.
I am a sucker for a lost cause. For a long shot. For the underdog. I want to see everyone win and most especially in love. But what I am learning in this life long lesson in letting go is that love is not enough. Love is cheapened and belittled when heaped upon someone who is incapable of intimacy, fidelity and honesty. Sometimes loving the sick, to include oneself, is just an endless exercise in fatal wounding. You think you are loving them and you into something better, something healthier, but the sickest person will always prevail. And that is why the letting go, the putting down all the things: the emotions, the thoughts, the dreams, the wishes, the connection is so very vital.
If I could have it my way, I would get a lobotomy. I wish there was a relational lobotomy one could get where you just have the recognition of this other person removed from your psyche. And then you could just let go and move on and be done with it and him and you and the whole beautiful disaster.
But that is not an option...at least not yet. Maybe one day we will have the capacity to alter ourselves so that we can just forget a particular person encapsulated in so much love and dreams and hope can just be eradicated from our lives. But that is not possible today, and likely for good reason. Can you imagine how many lobotomies one would have by now? I can tell you many fucking lobotomies over here.
Instead what is available to us today is the ability to start anew and let go of what is within our grasp today. To free ourselves of the grip of all the things we think we must do or know or change or hold onto. And trust that that which is meant for us will never miss us. And that which isn’t meant for us will never, ever stay.
I don’t know if I will ever marry up my death spiral thoughts and feelings with the reality of what the universe wants for me, but I know that I learn quite a lot of about this every time I am required to let go...of a thought, of a feeling, of a dream, of a person, of a love.
And I know, absolutely, this process of letting go will not kill me, but will instead teach me and grow me into whomever I am supposed to be next. It isn’t fun and painfree but it is a growing wisdom that propels me forward into whatever and whomever comes next. An increasing vibrational spiral upward that always feels way fucking better than the death spiral self will and compulsion get me.
Now if I can just remember that...
Again.
Still.
This is exactly what I think of when I think of my thoughts and feelings and letting go...