Letting Go

Has anyone ever told you to “just let it go”?

I don’t know about you, but I have found it remarkably ineffective.

In fact, there have probably been occasions when telling me to let something go has achieved precisely the opposite.

Rather than letting it go, I have immediately begun explaining why I shouldn’t.

Why what happened mattered.

Why the other person was wrong.

Why I was justified in feeling the way I did.

And before long, something that might have been quietly fading into the background has been dragged back into the middle of the room, dusted off and given a completely new lease of life.

Perhaps that is because letting go isn’t something another person can tell us to do.

We have to arrive there ourselves.

And perhaps the things we find hardest to let go of are difficult precisely because they mattered.

A person mattered.

A relationship mattered.

Something somebody did mattered.

An opportunity mattered.

The life we thought we were going to have mattered.

So maybe letting go isn’t about deciding that something no longer matters.

Perhaps it is accepting that it mattered then, but it does not have to control what happens next.

That sounds simple enough.

I’m not convinced it is.

Sometimes the past doesn’t announce itself as the past.

It arrives disguised as an argument about something happening today.

A remark is made. A criticism is offered. Something relatively ordinary happens.

And suddenly the conversation contains things that happened five, ten or twenty years ago.

One person may be talking about what happened today.

The other may be responding to everything that today represents.

And neither quite understands how they got there.

Perhaps that is because some things were never really put down.

They became connected to something larger — disappointment, betrayal, regret, anger, fear, or simply the way we came to see another person.

So we aren’t always reacting only to what was said.

Sometimes we are reacting to everything we believe it represents.

And that can affect much more than an occasional argument.

Sometimes we don’t carry the past only in our thoughts.

We carry it in what we do today.

We may drink too much. Work too much. Eat too much. Spend too much. Keep ourselves constantly occupied.

Perhaps anything that prevents us from sitting quietly with whatever is underneath.

And maybe the useful question isn’t simply:

Why am I doing this?

Maybe it is:

What am I trying not to feel?

Because if today’s behaviour is being used to dull yesterday’s hurt, then yesterday isn’t really yesterday at all.

It is still influencing today.

There is another side to this that I think matters.

Sometimes we are not the person who was hurt.

Sometimes we are the person who caused the hurt.

We may have acknowledged what we did.

We may regret it.

We may have apologised.

We may have behaved differently since.

But none of that gives us the right to decide when somebody else should stop hurting.

We cannot say, simply because enough time has passed for us:

Surely you should be over this by now.

For the other person, perhaps it isn’t over.

Perhaps some consequence of what happened is still very much alive.

But I think there is another truth sitting beside that one.

If someone accepts responsibility, genuinely changes and tries to repair what can be repaired, must that person forever remain defined by what they did?

I don’t think that is a particularly easy question.

One person may feel:

You expect me to forget what happened.

The other may feel:

How long must what happened continue to define who I am?

Both may have a point.

And somewhere between those two positions, something quite sad can happen.

The person who was hurt cannot let go of the hurt.

The person who caused it cannot escape the judgement.

And eventually the relationship itself can become the casualty.

Perhaps that raises another question: when does a relationship deserve another chance — and when is walking away the right thing to do?

Sometimes walking away is easier than letting go.

Sometimes walking away is also the right thing to do.

Not every relationship should survive simply because it has existed for a long time.

But letting go doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting.

It doesn’t necessarily mean forgiving.

It doesn’t mean pretending something didn’t matter.

And it certainly doesn’t mean allowing somebody who hurt us to hurt us again.

Perhaps it simply means reaching the point where we can say:

This happened. It mattered. It changed something. But I am no longer prepared to allow it to decide everything that happens next.

And perhaps sometimes what we need to let go of isn’t the person at all.

It may be our expectation of who they should have been.

Who we should have been.

Or what the relationship was supposed to look like.

Maybe there are relationships that can survive by becoming something different.

Maybe there are some that cannot.

I don’t pretend to know.

But before we put something — or someone — in the too-hard basket and walk away, perhaps there is one question worth sitting with:

Have we really understood what it is that we are unable to put down?

Because sometimes the thing we think we’re holding onto…

may actually be holding onto us.

A conversation shouldn’t be one-sided.

You may agree with some of this, disagree completely, or have an experience of your own to share. Either way, I’d be interested to hear what you think.