What is it you would let go of today?

by Margrett Dawson Wallace
(Pelham, Georgia USA)

What is it you would let go of today?

Even though you never said it…“I think you love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain…a lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”

It hurts to let go.

Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it's so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn't come back. You're left so alone that you can't explain. Damn, there's nothing like that, is there? I've been there and you have too. Are you, too, nodding your head?
When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising…Lease on Life. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to be programmed eventually for failure in every relationship we enter.

Is there right/wrong?

We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you are wrong in some way, and seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest fears, your unsolvable problems—the ones that make you truly who you are—that you’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person doing the right things Anita Baker …”Wrong Man”. But not just any wrong person: the right/wrong person…is there such a thing as wrong/right?—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, is not this the man I want to have? I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.
Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.

Light or Freight Train

Maybe it’s like I have said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel, then things happen - these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. The vessel starts to crack in places. Once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.
Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt release and surrender. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life. What is it you would let go of today?