Prompt: Let Go.

Prompt: Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

This was actually the prompt from yesterday but it has had me ruminating for almost two whole days now. Maybe three weeks ago, the phrase "let go" kinda became a mantra for me and when I saw this prompt it stopped me. There has been a lot of letting go this last month for me.

Some of it has to do with moving here. I honestly had a lot of preconceived notions about how I would feel and groove here. How fast (notice- not slow!) I would adjust. But I haven't. It will be 6 months tomorrow and I thought I would be a lot further along. But I am not and it's okay! I have let go of those notions and am enjoying this middle space of who and where I am at. All it took was letting go.

Some of the letting go has to do with friendship. I just realized that instead of putting mental time and energy, emotional value and holding my worth as friend in someone else's hands, I needed to let go. For now. I needed to let go to free up space to move and grow in friendships here. To feel like enough.

Some of it has to do with my marriage. I didn't realize it, but there are so many knee jerk reactions I have to things that happened during the school widow years, and instead of letting them go, I just react in the way I would have reacted back then, even though it has been almost a full year since we have been past that phase! There was a long life changing conversation that completely changed my paradigm. I have let go of so much since that oddly timed discussion- quickly and without looking back! I am so grateful.

At one of the last RAW nights I went to before moving here, someone had a book of poems or something. There was one in there called "Letting Go". At the time it talked of physical pain (the author suffering from arthritis) and how sometimes you have to befriend the pain in order to move past it. It really resonated with me because when I was going through all my nerve things with my hands and feet, I practiced this without thought. I learned quickly that fighting pain makes it fight right back, at least for me. When you let go and stop fighting it, you learn to sit with it and let it have its space, then you move on. You don't hold onto it, you don't go back to it again and again. You let go and stop trying to control it. Let go and it lets go of you.

Along that same line...I can say that this year (mostly in the last 6 months) I have learned the same with emotional pain. Sometimes there is nothing you can do to escape it. You can busy yourself, try to think of the good times, the good things, justify this, that, and the other...talk your way through it. At the end of the day, it still will get ya. For me, it's in the letting go that I am finally feeling free. Sometimes you have to let go and just trust.

xoxx