On Letting Go
I was pissed off this week and wanted to write about it.
Recently, my boyfriend went out of town while I had a retreat with friends over the weekend. It was nice. We watched The Cheetah Girls 2, we ate cupcakes, played Uno, and drank a signature cocktail made up of gin, lemonade, and blackberry puree. A time was had, but I still missed my guy.
He had a late-night flight and I had a day of programming to conquer, so I figured the following Monday would be extra special. I could do work all day, and I could meet with someone I care about come nighttime.
After we got off work, we planned to head downtown to eat something delicious, enjoy a nice drink, and take in the scenes of the city. We would debrief on our separate adventures, have a little fun, and be back home by 10:00pm so we could rinse and repeat for the next day ahead.
He picked me up, we listened to some bomb new music, parked his car, and headed to our destination around the block.
Carelessly, we strolled along the Northside of Downtown Birmingham. I spent the walk practically salivating over my inclement Quesadilla Al Pastor and the Pineapple Jarrito’s I was going to wash it down with. Ever since my boyfriend had impulsively purchased matching bottle openers from a gas station on our previous taqueria-and-Jarrito’s summer date, I had been looking forward to being able to use mine. It was a reminder of the care I had received in that moment, kind of on a whim.
The vibes were on point. That night was going to be special.
And in the literal blink of an eye, I felt the rug being ripped from under the feet of my picturesque fantasy of an evening.
We made it to the door of the restaurant. I could smell the food floating on the air, the neon lights twinkled against the blue hour of the night, and through the window I saw my past sitting at the bar.
Carelessly, he sat there like a stain on my entire existence.
And for the most part, that’s what his existence meant to me. A stain.
The next moments feel blurry. My palms were sweating, my stomach dropped as if I were on a rollercoaster, and my heart began beating out of my chest. What was strange was that my body seemed to be moving asynchronously with my head.
Now look, I don’t mean to brag, but I have spent a significant amount of time over the past several months learning how to weather the storm of my depression, anxiety, and past trauma—especially what feelings lingered in respect to him—into a little manageable drizzle that allowed me to walk through my own life.
I had spent months convincing myself that I would never have to face the people who hurt me, never have to hear their voices, or be brought back to how they made me feel in those moments of neglect, abandonment, rejection, and harm.
And yet, after all this time, here was the past relaxing at the restaurant I had been looking forward to spending time with one of my most dear people.
Knowing all the effort it took just to be able to leave the house and be upright again, the first thing that entered my mind was a very loud and very resentful:
“Why?”
In all my anger, my body kept moving.
Before I—or my beloved—had time to process what was going on, my nervous system had sprung into action. Like an automaton, I had moved back across the street and found an alley to hide in. I leaned against a wall, let my breath steady, and when I was calm enough, I had the strength to explain to a very panicked and scared boyfriend what was going on.
“I saw him.”
I didn’t have to say much, but he understood.
We went back to his car, picked a different Mexican restaurant on the other side of town to eat, and had a moderately enjoyable rest of our evening.
What lingered wasn’t the change of plans.
It was the feeling.
Anger. Resentment. Frustration.
There was so much I had learned to let go of that all came rushing back in a matter of seconds.
Years of journaling and bad poetry and rehashing all of our conversations. Searching for the perfect string of words that would suddenly make someone determined to misunderstand me suddenly give me everything I felt was missing. Everything my parents couldn’t give me. Everything old friends and ex-lovers couldn’t give me. Everything I felt I was owed by some cosmic force in the universe that suddenly makes life fair.
Just when I finally had a new job, new memories with friends, new accomplishments, new projects, and a shiny-new outlook on life, here his big block-head ass gone go and fuck up the vibe.
I went to sleep that night consumed with rage.
I felt genuinely embarrassed that this was still bothering me. That it was still so fresh in my mind. That he still had the power to get under my skin like he used to.
My boyfriend asked me if I was okay and I answered honestly.
I wasn’t.
Why should I have to adjust my plans to keep myself safe?
My boyfriend stopped me.
“I get that you’re angry, but sometimes the best revenge is a life well lived. He doesn’t have the power he used to have in your life anymore. Don’t give him the satisfaction.”
The idea of someone being satisfied that I was sat doing my makeup and simultaneously becoming undone made me even more enraged.
I remember mumbling a silent prayer and a few new-age spirituality mantras to help me calm down enough to drive to the new job I had BEGGED God for.
I packed up my materials, put on some music, and started my drive.
About five minutes out, I noticed a very large red ant crawling across my dashboard.
I felt disgusted.
An unwanted inconvenience on my day. A damper on my mood. A blemish to be removed.
I pulled over to try and let the poor lil guy out before I killed it in a rage. He wouldn’t budge and, in an effort to not get bitten, I had to do what needed to be done.
I had to use my water bottle and get rid of the poor guy.
Now, I won’t compare that lil innocent creature to that harrowing figure of my past. That lil ant just lived close to my house and wandered into the car by happenstance. And to be fair, the same can be said of old dude.
I wasn’t so pressed that the ant and him had showed up at all.
I knew ants existed.
I knew old dude wasn’t dead.
I think I was upset that I had to be the one to see them when I was seeing them.
While scraping the ant guts off my drinking cup and dousing my hands in sanitizer, I felt a tear fall, then two, then a never-ending spiral of shame and guilt and anxiety and anger.
Who was he to infiltrate my life and make me cry twelve hours after I had seen him?
Who was he to ruin my makeup on the way to a new job that had NOTHING to do with him?
And more importantly, why was I so sensitive, so malleable, and so weak that his mere presence could still disrupt my life all this time later?
I knew I was going to be late anyway, and I needed to calm down, so I called a friend.
We talked about everything, but mainly we discussed how disappointed in myself I had become when, just twenty-four hours prior, I had felt on top of the world.
I was doing the thing. I was living. I was seeing friends, going dancing, eating good, looking good, smelling good, making good art and teaching about it. I had—and have—a guy I’m crazy about.
And still, I was upset at failing this ambiguous benchmark of “letting go.”
Before this week, I had a barely adequate understanding of what it means to let go.
In my mind, letting go meant forgetting.
It meant indifference.
It meant your stomach doesn’t drop if you see them out and about.
That you don’t wince when you hear their name spoken.
That you’ve risen above being affected by what horrendous hurt has come to pass.
I spent twenty minutes venting, tearing into myself, berating myself for not forgetting, for still feeling hurt, for still having him take up space in my mind.
My friend took a moment, breathed in, and said:
“What you’re feeling sounds understandable and shitty. I’m sorry you’re feeling this way and it’s normal to still be affected by it.”
I was flabbergasted.
I had spent my life having my emotional experiences dismissed, belittled, boiled down to sensitivity and irrationality.
I was just neurotic and it was my responsibility not to be.
It never occurred to me that it was simply okay to be affected.
It was in those moments I realized that a lot of what I had been missing following the hurt and betrayal of someone who called themselves my friend was compassion.
Not towards him.
Towards myself.
I had spent months in therapy and through journaling trying to arrive at where his side of things landed.
I attempted to walk in his shoes.
I empathized with feeling like I might need to break someone’s heart in order to pursue my own happiness.
I reprimanded myself for the ways I could have been more empathetic.
I agonized over all the words I had let come forth from my lips. Words I couldn’t ever take back. Words that haunt me to this very day.
And I realized that if I could do all of this for him, and still hold the nuance of the guilt and anger and the pain, why couldn’t I do this for myself?
I hadn’t really accepted that I was like everyone else.
I had assumed that I was a unique evil in the world.
I had spent so much time picking myself apart that I hadn’t realized I was deserving of compassion too.
No one in their right mind chooses to hold on the way PTSD and BPD and depression and anxiety seem capable of holding on.
I didn’t consciously choose to have a depressive episode.
I didn’t choose to have a panic attack on the side of the road after something as insignificant as killing an ant.
I didn’t plan to have a flashback and amygdala hijack outside of the city’s most popular taqueria.
I didn’t choose to be in a work dynamic that harmed me.
And if I had it to do over, I would have removed myself from it in a significantly less dramatic way.
I was deserving of grace.
I was deserving of forgiveness.
I deserved a little compassion.
And so I took it.
I called in. I called my therapist. I watched a comforting movie and waited until I could hop on with a mental health professional to process what this meant for me.
And I realized I did have something to let go of.
I had to release the belief that forgiveness means self-abandonment.
That accountability means self-punishment.
I had to let go of the idea that being bothered by a dynamic that hurt me is some failure on my part.
That I was a failure for running away from danger.
That it’s okay to choose to keep myself safe.
I don’t have all the answers still.
I don’t know what letting go will look like a week from now, a month from now, or even a year from now.
But I think moving on requires us, on some level, to hold on to the here and now.
It demands that we’re real with ourselves about where we are, not where we think we should be.
A reality I have to face for myself is that I am a mentally ill person and emotions come and go a little slower for me.
Maybe it’ll save me the trouble of stressing over where I should be if I accept where I am and give myself enough compassion to allow that to be okay.
I think that’s truly what it means to let go.
Regardless, I’m holding on to this new perspective so that one day, I might finally be able to let go.
Till next time,
— Lorraine