Letting go isn’t the easiest thing in the world, PARTICULARLY when you’re doing just fine in comfort. You can look around you and on the surface, nothing appears to be wrong.
You have it.
That successful career.
The thriving business.
The family.
The house.
The car.
The kids.
Whatever it was that was in your dream – that you in you that needed more more more more (I always think of the villain on Men in Black standing in the kitchen drinking sugar, asking for more) – you achieved it. And in telling yourself, “I’ll be happy when _______ happens. I’ll be happier when __________ happens. I’ll be happy when I reach ___________,” maybe you created the perfect storm of malcontent, because you never realized that things, people, jobs, and money don’t make you happy.
Happiness, turns out, comes from within.
So what happens, then?
What happens when your soul knows deep down inside that you were made for more, yet the life around you is perfectly comfortable?
Maybe you stay.
Maybe you stay longer than you should.
Maybe you stay so long that the universe is literally SCREAMING at you with signs.
Signs like – hitting a dog going 60 miles an hour HEAD ON on a county road.
Signs like – extraordinary financial discomfort, and nothing moving the needle, or just scraping by with your head above water.
Signs like – everything and everyone around you sapping your energy until you’re so incredibly emotionally exhausted you don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning.
Signs like – your entire house being trashed despite being a perfectionist because you’ve just given up, because you’re in such resistance with universal energy that depression is setting in, because IT’S TOO HARD.
What if I told you that you staying has way less to do with “things not being that bad” and way more to do with societal conditioning, fear, insecurity and unresolved traumas from past relationships, our childhood or deep emotional wounds or even (I’m going there) past life karma.
Would you tell me that’s bullshit?
Or would you maybe start to explore what it is inside you that is so afraid of ditching the status quo?
I mean, of course there’s the science side of it:
How our body craves automation and how we subconsciously wire ourselves to respond based on our experiences and repeat the same cycles (even if they’re toxic) over and over and form an addiction to the chemicals and hormones that our body releases when we get upset or trigger. There’s that. (We can dig into that in a separate blog, it’s a bit of a rabbit hole)
BUT that’s just defense mechanisms. What you really have to explore is the root of it.
As I look upon my social media memories from a year ago, I see my own emotional battle back and forth. The emotions of an exciting moment when the brewery achieved something, the sadness that would come over me when the family was having a great time together and knowing that it wouldn’t be the same, the worry that everything would fall apart and be even more uncomfortably comfortable than it already was.
Can you imagine? Living in such a state of discomfort for so long that it’s just COMFORTABLE?
Entirely losing the resolve to change your situation and just reveling in your own mediocrity of the life that you thought you wanted, but turns out is entirely NOT fulfilling your soul?
(This isn’t meaning to suggest things are THAT BAD or were ever THAT BAD, they just weren’t right.)
Sometimes things need to fall apart. Sometimes we don’t realize that in doing what we think might be the right thing – say, remaining in a situation where no one is truly fulfilled – is actually NOT the right thing, it’s just the easiest thing.
My soul knew that our marriage was over, and while I had yet to see what it would look like, I knew it was time. Something was calling and pulling at me. I wasn’t honoring myself. I wasn’t honoring my soul. There existed a greater purpose for me and living in the cycles that we lived in, I could never have elevated to where I needed to be as an individual in order to fulfill that mission.
But I fought with myself. There wasn’t just the “vows of marriage” or the perception of my friends and family and peers holding me back (though those were significant factors, of course), it was that deep down there were a LOT of wounds keeping me there too.
Abandonment issues from losing my father to suicide at age 5 and then the subsequent emotional abandonment that occurred with my mother as she took on everything and was not only not present in my life, but exhibited narcissistic tendencies that were incredibly emotionally scarring. This made me crave love and affection so much that I became entirely without boundaries in seeking the approval of others. It also made me scared to lose anyone. It made me codependent. It put my husband in a cage. And that cage manifested some shitty things in our relationship.
There was so much to let go of.
I find new things to let go of every day.
But my point here is that when it came time to leave, I hesitated for a long, long time. The security of having what society told me was all I needed for happiness, of seeming to embody the “#relationshipgoals” hashtag, of being afraid to be alone, of not entirely being sure how the brewery would make rent for an entire other place work when we were in the middle of foreclosure proceedings and our credit was annihilated with a business that, while doing well, was still under SO much financial strain from debt and reinvestment requirements.
Turns out, though, that I was standing in my own way. I was blocking both my husband and myself from the lives that we’d find exponentially more fulfilling than the last few years of fighting.
And I HATE admitting that. I hate that even typing that sometimes feels like admitting defeat. I hate that something in my life wasn’t a resounding success. I don’t DO failure. And while that overwhelmingly stubborn tenacity is such a good quality in so many ways – it was NOT a quality to hold onto the wrong things for. It’s like the book that I love by Seth Godin. The Dip. It’s all about knowing when to quit and when to stick. But maybe that’s not the perspective here, because it WAS a success. It was a success for what it was supposed to be. And the biggest success mutually for us came in being able to let it go.
I have a few girlfriends that have recently messaged me in difficult situations. Some of them are related to this exact thing. Some of them are related to just being in their own way in their love life – finding difficulty in letting go of those inner feelings of inadequacy enough to allow themselves to do the inner work to attract better in their lives.
But here’s my advice, if you want it, if you even made it this far:
That saying? Set love free? It’s legit a thing.
Set free your expectations for what love is supposed to be or look like.
Set free your wounds and feelings of inadequacy in looking all around you to fill something that can only be found in yourself.
Set free the love that you wanted so desperately to be the thing, the love that you’re holding onto because you’ve invested so much there…
There comes a time when an investment can no longer grow in your portfolio.
It’s time.
Set it free and make room for incredible things that are to come.
What is yours will never leave you. It is part of you. It is within you. Trust that and that’s all the security you need to make any decision in your life.
I believe in you.
Recent Comments